Mr. Speaker: Order. If we are to make proper progress down the Order Paper, as I always seek to do, we need to make progress a little more quickly.

Quentin Davies: It was neither of those two things. The contract award was made on value for money, which was a function of performance reliability and cost. I understand my hon. Friend's disappointment about the decision, but we have to make such decisions on the basis of value for money. I would certainly be happy to accept his invitation to come to Newcastle and to meet the management and the work force again.

James Arbuthnot: A year ago, the Minister was good enough to meet Piers Bishop of Resolution, which has done groundbreaking work on mental health issues among our armed forces. Does Resolution still have a part to play on this issue, to which I know the Minister has given a great deal of his own personal attention?

Jeremy Corbyn: in the light of the agreement between Russia and the United States last weekend as part of the strategic arms reduction treaty, would this not be an appropriate time at which to reconsider the strategy of replacing the Trident nuclear missile system, which would both contribute to nuclear disarmament and save us all a great deal of money?

Ian Davidson: Does the Secretary of State agree that there is a contradiction between the arguments of those who say that not enough money is being spent on defence while also saying that the break clauses in the contract for the aircraft carriers must be examined? [Hon. Members: "Ah!"] I note that my view is supported by Opposition Members.
	May I also ask whether the Secretary of State has received any communications from either of the main Opposition parties stating whether they will support the Government's proposal to proceed with the next stage of the type 26 shipping order, and whether he thinks that the placing of that order was excellent, very excellent, or simply magnificent?

Liam Fox: On leave back home during their deployment in Afghanistan, a growing number of service personnel have been refused entry to pubs and clubs because some local authorities refuse to accept military identity cards, which have date of birth details, as proof as age. It is scandalous that our troops can die in Helmand but be refused a pint in their local. The Government have known about this problem for some time, so why has nothing been done? Will they now, in their last days, do something about it?

Bill Rammell: On long-range search and rescue, the introduction of the MRA4 means that there will be substantially more capable aircraft than the MR2 in the RAF's fleet. In the period of transition until the MRA4 enters service we intend to use other assets, as available, in a long-range search and rescue role. The reason why we take the decisions that we do is because we are responsible for these budgets and for prioritising Afghanistan as our main effort. As we have repeatedly made clear, the Conservative party is not committed to spending one penny more on defence than this Government are-in fact, the reverse is true because the Conservatives are not even prepared to commit to next year's spending. Until they do so, their words are simply hollow.

Bill Rammell: I genuinely disagree with my hon. Friend. I think that if we followed the path that he is advocating, in circumstances in which it is not possible to provide security across the board, we would simply be creating a second market for poppy cultivation. That is why-across Government, with our international partners and supporting the Afghan Government-we must create an environment in which it is possible for alternative crops to be produced. I genuinely do not believe that the course set out by my hon. Friend would help us to achieve that.

Quentin Davies: I would be delighted to visit Kyle of Lochalsh and the Raasay ranges. As the right hon. Gentleman will know, the proposals put forward by QinetiQ to rationalise those ranges have now been withdrawn. If in the future those proposals are resubmitted or if other proposals are made I shall certainly visit the ranges before taking any decisions-as I did, as the right hon. Gentleman will recall, in the case of the Hebrides ranges last year.

Oliver Heald: It is an important question. The Secretary of State will know that in 1998, 1999, 2002 and 2007 the defence budget fell in real terms. As for the following years, in Kosovo, our boys had to go out and buy mobile phones because the radios did not work; in Iraq, the boots melted and their equipment and clothing were not right for those conditions, so they had to go and buy their own clothing; and in Afghanistan, there have not been enough helicopters, there have not been the right personnel vehicles and there have not been enough spares, so they have had to cannibalise equipment all over the world, causing chaos. Does not the Secretary of State accept that it is time first to admit that this system of logistics and procurement has been hopeless and secondly to apologise for putting lives at risk?

Robert Key: Does the Secretary of State agree that it is always a case of lies, damn lies and statistics, and that it is a matter of great regret that, since the Prime Minister lost his way on defence statistics, it has done nobody any good that we cannot trust the Government on their defence statistics? Does he agree that we really have to stop that, and that we have to have a perfectly straightforward, simple way, on which everyone can agree, of deciding exactly how much a Department is spending?

Bernard Jenkin: Pursuant to the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd, West (Mr. Jones), what will be the arrangements to report changes in deployments in Helmand, now that the Secretary of State has confirmed that such deployments are in flux and under discussion?

Philip Davies: In 2004, the then Chancellor slashed the helicopter budget by £1.4 billion. The Government recognised that that was a mistake, and ordered an additional 22 Chinooks. What guarantees can the Secretary of State give that we will not have a repeat of the delays suffered in the Chinook mark 3 programme, and that the Chinooks will get full release to service by 2013?

Kevan Jones: I already have, and any such comments were unintended. On the vote that took place last May, the Government have now put in place very robust procedures in Kathmandu to ensure that those Gurkhas who wish to settle here can do free of charge-without being charged in any way. However, I would like to put on the record my wholehearted condemnation of those middlemen and unscrupulous operators who are charging Gurkhas. If the hon. Gentleman, like me, had visited Aldershot last week, as I know the hon. Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth) did, in order to see Gurkhas-many of them more than 60 years old-who have come here with expectations that, frankly, will never be realised, he would be rightly angry. I certainly am on that point.

Michael Fabricant: Defence Ministers have rightly praised the work of doctors and nurses at Selly Oak. Ministers will know that the Defence Medical and Education Training Agency is about to move to Whittington barracks near Lichfield. Will someone please make a statement as to the progress on that installation?

Gordon Brown: With permission, Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a statement on the European Council held in Brussels last Thursday and Friday.
	First, I am sure that the whole House will join me in paying tribute to Lance Corporal of Horse Jonathan Woodgate from the Household Cavalry Regiment and Rifleman Daniel Holkham from 3rd Battalion the Rifles. They lost their lives fighting in Afghanistan. We owe them the greatest debt of gratitude for their courage and their service.
	Their sacrifice reminds us that terrorism is an ever-present danger which requires vigilance and the willingness to take tough action in all areas where terrorist groups operate. So I know also that the thoughts of the House-and indeed our country-are with the Russian people today after this morning's terrorist attack on the Moscow transport network. I have written to President Medvedev this morning to send our condolences to the victims and their families. I pay tribute to the Russian emergency services and the people of Moscow as they have responded to this appalling attack.
	The focus of the European Council last Thursday and Friday was on actions needed to secure growth for the future and on Europe's determination to bring new impetus and momentum to the international negotiations on climate change. Last week's Budget set out our proposals for the next stage of economic recovery. It made it clear that the risks to recovery remain real and that we must avoid a premature withdrawal of stimulus measures, instead seeing through our commitment to halve the deficit over four years without choking off the recovery itself. The European Council agreed that
	"The economic situation is improving, but the recovery is still fragile".
	It concluded that while deficit reduction plans must go ahead, measures to reduce the stimulus should be taken only once recovery is secured. That is the position that we, like our European partners, will continue to follow.
	In our Budget, we also set out the actions that we must now take to secure jobs and growth by investing in the key growth sectors for the future. The Council's conclusions agreed that Europe needs
	"to deliver more growth and jobs"
	to boost European competitiveness and productivity. Before the financial crisis, the imbalances within Europe were at an all-time high. The Council agreed that
	"The EU needs to focus on the pressing challenges of competitiveness and balance of payments developments".
	It also agreed to develop a new strategy to deliver higher levels of long-term growth and recognised that the key elements of increasing productivity and growth include action on employment, on research and development, on reducing greenhouse gases to boost low-carbon industries and on education and social inclusion. The European Council will now, once a year through a leaders' annual economic summit, assess the progress achieved at both national and European level in delivering those objectives.
	The Council also discussed the economic situation in Greece. Agreement has now been reached by the euro area member states on a set of guidelines for Greece, and I am encouraged by the statement from the eurozone leaders that the eurozone will meet its responsibilities. There was no request for the United Kingdom to make any contribution to that programme, and none of the arrangements agreed by the European Council will see any powers being ceded from Britain to the European Union.
	One year on from the G20 summit in London, we also discussed Europe's plans for the next G20 summit, which is to be held in Toronto. The Council agreed that "rapid progress" is now required on strengthening financial regulation and supervision within both the EU and the G20, while we also need to ensure a level playing field for financial centres worldwide. In particular, we agreed that progress is needed on the issues of capital requirements, systemic institutions, financial instruments for crisis management, transparency on derivative markets and the implementation of internationally agreed principles for bonuses in the financial services sector. The Council agreed to make rapid progress on those issues, concluding work on the new European supervisory framework in time for the European systemic risk board and the three European supervisory authorities to begin work in early 2011.
	We must also agree in Toronto a co-ordinated approach to levies on the banks to deliver a fairer balance of risk and reward in the financial system. That is something that I have been advocating for some months, and the Council agreed that as part of the G20's work:
	"The Commission will shortly present a report on possible innovative sources of financing such as a global levy on financial transactions...The Council and the Commission will report back on these issues to the June 2010 European Council, ahead of the Toronto summit."
	The Council also discussed climate change, ahead of the first meeting of the advisory group on climate change financing, established by the United Nations Secretary-General, which I am co-chairing with Prime Minister Meles of Ethiopia. Our pledge on climate change finance is a vital first test of the commitment of the developed countries to meet the promises made in Copenhagen. The Council concluded that Europe would rapidly and unconditionally implement its commitment to provide €2.4 billion annually for fast-track financing for developing countries, and to that end the EU
	"will initiate consultations on practical ways"
	to implement that in specific areas. There will be a presentation on those commitments at the Bonn summit. The Council confirmed that Europe's objective remains a
	"global and comprehensive legal agreement"
	and that Europe will "strengthen its outreach" to other countries to galvanise negotiations in the coming months.
	The euro area's economic growth is predicted to be just 0.7 per cent. this year and next, recovering to 1.5 per cent. in later years. By contrast, world growth is projected to be 3.5 per cent, so we need stronger European growth to help deliver stronger growth and new jobs here in Britain. Europe is the world's largest trading bloc and also the world's largest internal market. It offers 500 million consumers for British companies. With 3 million UK jobs linked to the EU, and still more than half our exports going to the EU, Britain's livelihood is inextricably linked to the success of the European economy. Distancing ourselves from Europe makes no sense and would hold back our economy, our companies and people in work. It is by working with, not against, our European partners to deliver jobs and growth for Europe that we will help to deliver jobs and growth for Britain. I commend this statement to the House.

David Cameron: I join the Prime Minister in paying tribute to Rifleman Daniel Holkham and Lance Corporal of Horse Jonathan Woodgate, who have been killed in Afghanistan in the past few days. When one thinks of what Jonathan Woodgate had already been through, it is a reminder of what an exceptionally brave young man he was. It also reminds us that what we ask of our servicemen and women today is exceptional; we need to refresh and renew the military covenant in every way that we can.
	I also agree with the Prime Minister that we should send a clear message of sympathy and solidarity to the Russian people after the appalling outrage on the Russian metro. We are tragically familiar with such an event in this country, too.
	I want to ask about three issues that were discussed at the summit-the EU economy, financial regulation and climate change. First, on climate change, the summit rightly said that we must redouble our efforts to achieve the global deal that we all want and push ahead with practical action to cut emissions. The UK has the lowest contribution from renewable energy of any major EU country-just 6.8 per cent. of our electricity and, in total, 2.5 per cent. of our energy comes from renewable sources. Why has so little progress been made?
	Secondly, on financial regulation, President Obama spoke about a tax on wholesale funding, but, as the Prime Minister has said, the summit conclusions referred to a transaction tax. Would not a tax on wholesale funding rather than a transaction tax be more likely to help keep business here in Britain?
	The summit conclusions mention the need for greater economic co-ordination. There was some controversy about whether we will end up with any new treaty changes. Should not the Prime Minister make three things clear today? First, any talk of "economic government" in Europe is wrong. If he agrees, can he explain why the phrase remains in the French version of the eurozone statement? Secondly, should not we rule out any new treaty change that increases EU control over our economic policies? Thirdly, should not we change the law in the UK so that any treaty that proposed handing over new areas of power from Britain to Brussels would automatically be subject to a referendum, as is the case in Ireland?
	It is good to see the Prime Minister smiling so nicely, as he does on all our posters-it is good to see him in that sort of positive mood. There are plenty more where they came from.  [Interruption.] If he will not put himself on posters, we have just got to do it for him.
	On economic policy, does the Prime Minister agree with the Europe 2020 strategy document, which says that
	"sound public finances are critical for restoring the conditions for sustainable growth and jobs"?
	Given that, will he comment on the serious news today that Standard & Poor's has stated yet again that the outlook for Britain's triple-A credit rating remains "negative" and that
	"additional spending measures will likely be required"
	to tackle the debt burden?
	Europe's leaders talked about a bail-out for Greece, and Portugal's credit rating is being downgraded. However, is not Britain borrowing more this year as a share of our economy than either Greece or Portugal? Did not the same agency that downgraded Portugal's credit rating say last week that Britain's finances are "vulnerable"?
	The European Commission says that "a number of countries" may have to start tackling their deficits this year. Given that Britain and Ireland have the worst budget deficits in the OECD, to which countries does the Prime Minister think it was referring? On unemployment, business closures and the decline of manufacturing, the UK clearly has some real problems. Why, therefore, does he propose to raise taxes on small businesses and hike national insurance on everyone earning more than £20,000 and on every single new job in this country?
	The Chancellor admitted in the Budget that there was £11 billion of waste in Government spending, but he proposes to do nothing about it until 2011. Why is not he tackling the waste this year rather than putting up national insurance for hard-working people next year? Have not the Prime Minister and his Chancellor created one of those great dividing lines that they like so much? Labour stands for waste and taxes, and the Conservative party stands for efficiency and aspiration. As the Prime Minister contemplates his national insurance increase on employees and employers, what on earth makes him think that the way to rescue an economy from the longest and deepest recession on record is a tax on jobs that hits every single business in the country?  [Interruption.] He says that he wants to talk about Europe-I am talking about our economy in Europe and our failure in Europe.
	The Prime Minister used to go to European meetings to lecture others about their economic policies; now the reverse happens. He thought boom and bust had been abolished and that he could borrow with impunity; he never prepared for a rainy day. Were not those catastrophic misjudgments? Will not the British people be paying for those misjudgments for another generation? Is not his latest misjudgement to sit back and let the waste, the taxes and the debt pile up even more? Is it not the case that we need a Government who will get on with tackling the waste, stopping the tax rises and securing growth for the future?

Gordon Brown: The policy of the Government is to make sure that we have a sustained economic recovery; the Conservative party policy, I am afraid, would put that recovery at risk. Then the Conservatives are going to spend nearly £30 billion on tax cuts in the next five years, which puts front-line public services at risk. People will understand that these panic measures by the Conservatives will not help a recovery, that they will mean public spending cuts and that they will put sustained investment in our economy at risk.
	We are the party that believes in Europe: they are the party opposed to Europe. We can see that if the Conservative party had ever been willing to change, it would have changed on Europe. It has not changed on Europe, and it has not changed on anything else.

Nicholas Clegg: I wish to add my own expressions of sympathy and condolence to the family and friends of Rifleman Daniel Holkham, from 3rd Battalion the Rifles, and Lance Corporal of Horse, Jonathan Woodgate, from the Household Cavalry Regiment, both of whom tragically lost their lives in Afghanistan this week.
	I also wish to join the Prime Minister in expressing our condolences to the families and friends of the dozens of victims injured and killed in Moscow. Londoners especially, given the horrors of 7/7, will feel a strong bond of sympathy for the families of commuters affected in Moscow.
	I thank the Prime Minister for his report from the European Council. It will most probably be his last European Union summit. I imagine that he will be feeling some relief about that, given that in a few short years he has gone from lecturing his colleagues in Europe on how not to run an economy to teaching them how not to run an economy by example. At last week's summit, the Prime Minister called in some of the few favours he has left from his colleagues in Europe to delay a decision on the alternative investment fund managers directive. Instead of defensively trying to stave off damage to the City, why did he not take the chance to show real leadership on the reform of our banking system? Real leadership is breaking up the banks. Real leadership is imposing an additional levy on their profits until that is done. Real leadership is getting banks lending to small, viable companies that are going to the wall.
	Will the Prime Minister report on any conversations that he had with President Barroso, the President of the European Commission, as this summit was after all their first meeting since the Commission issued its damning verdict on the Prime Minister's handling of Britain's huge budget deficit? No doubt the European Commission will today be equally dismayed by the shiny promises of tax cuts from the shadow Chancellor, who is not in his place-he must be preparing for the mauling that he will get on television tonight. He has no idea how he will pay for those tax cuts. Labour and the Conservatives seem to be competing to come up with the most ludicrous fantasy announcement paid for with bags of gold found through efficiency savings. I am not sure who is winning, but I am certain that no one is falling for it.
	On the bail-out for the Greek Government, as the Prime Minister knows, instability in the eurozone can and will rapidly turn to instability across the European Union, which will affect us too. Given that, I found the lack of details about the potential Greek bail-out a little concerning. Yes, Greece has not yet formally asked for help, but we have a deal on the table that is meant to calm the markets' nerves but gives us very little in the way of detail. The Prime Minister is frowning, but can he tell me what will be the exact role of the IMF in this deal? How will the burden be broken up between the other eurozone countries? What is the maximum level of support likely to be given to Greece in the event that it asks for help and, crucially, what conditions will be put on Greece in return for this support?

John Denham: This country has faced the deepest recession in living memory and the Budget outlines how we will secure the recovery and the future in a way that is sustainable and fair. The Budget is a new growth plan for the future. At its heart is a £2.5 billion one-off growth package to help small business, promote innovation and invest in national infrastructure and key skills. It is a Budget to secure the recovery, tackle borrowing and invest in our industrial future. It continues targeted support for businesses and families where and when it is needed and it sets out how we will stick to our plan to halve the deficit within four years.
	When the global recession hit, we faced a choice as a Government: to stand aside and leave the economy to the markets or to step in and protect people from the worst effects. The Opposition could have joined us, but they did not. They turned their backs on people up and down the country. Their do-nothing approach would have left communities to fend for themselves. They were wrong then and they are wrong today, and they would put the recovery at risk.
	There are signs of desperation from the Opposition. Two months ago, they said that not doing more on the deficit was "moral cowardliness." We then heard from them about spending promises on the married man's allowance, tax give-aways for the richest estates, selling off the banks at a discount rate rather than getting taxpayers' money back, and last week they implied that there would be billons extra to increase personal allowances. Today, it is national insurance contributions. They are promising the impossible: tax cuts, deficit cuts and spending commitments all at the same time. It is an incompetent economic plan that would put the recovery at risk.
	My right hon. Friend the Chancellor made the tough decision to put an extra penny on national insurance, but that will come into effect only in April 2011, after the recovery is secured, and 60 per cent. of the revenue from our fair tax increases comes from the wealthiest 5 per cent.
	We took action during the recession. We stepped in because we believe that it is Government's responsibility to help people during difficult times. That is why we have helped businesses, allowing them to spread more than £5 billion of tax over a more affordable period through the time-to-pay service. It is why extra job advisers and other measures are in place, so that unemployment is running at 500,000 less than that expected by independent forecasters last year. It is why we put in place help for people struggling with their mortgages, through which 330,000 families received help or advice over the past year.
	Government action has helped people get through the recession, and businesses and families have been prepared to tighten their belts and take tough decisions. A strong competitive global economy for the future cannot rely on only one area or business model, but should rely on a diverse economy where everyone can play their part and has the opportunities they want. The Budget outlines how the Government will build that new recovery.
	The Opposition do not have a growth strategy. We know that the shadow Business Secretary said a few days ago that the words "industrial strategy" send a shiver down his spine. Renewing our infrastructure is a vital part of the recovery. A strong country and a strong economy need a strong and modern infrastructure. Our transport, water, waste, communications and energy infrastructure needs to be built for recovery and to pave the way for a low-carbon economy. We need to invest in that modern infrastructure.
	We can renew regional economies, renew and reinvent the manufacturing base, and build new competitive strengths in technologies, services and creative industries by investing in the skills, research and technologies that support them. The Government have already invested heavily in infrastructure, with more than £150 billion invested in transport networks over the past decade, and we have now set out plans for a new high-speed rail network. The "Strategy for national infrastructure", which was published last week, gives an overview of the current state of the UK's infrastructure. It identifies the challenges and opportunities, and sets out the areas for action. We will create a green investment bank to invest in low-carbon infrastructure, particularly in transport and energy, and we will invest an additional £250 million in making further progress on the managed motorways programme and other transport projects.
	The Government have always sought to ensure that all parts of the country benefit from economic growth. Their action and investment have helped to narrow the gap between the most deprived neighbourhoods and the national average on health, crime, education and worklessness. Ten years of public investment and the creation of the regional development agencies have paid huge dividends-restoring our universities and science base to world status and closing a lot of the backlog in investment in Britain's transport system and infrastructure. There has been huge investment in apprenticeships and skills, and we are a far stronger country because of that, as we work to secure the recovery.
	Supporting strong regions and regional recovery is not the policy of the Opposition, however, who are committed to scrapping RDAs. That would threaten regional economic recovery, put at risk the strategic investment in jobs that the RDAs are helping to create, and bring uncertainty when every business group says that we need to build confidence. Every area of the country should share in the increased prosperity that will come with recovery, so Regional Ministers will have a bigger role in promoting growth to make sure that their areas benefit. They will be supported by a regional growth fund that is to be established by the RDAs to promote investment and support growth. Strong city regions will have more autonomy and freedom to promote growth, and accelerated development zones will be piloted to support projects that deliver key infrastructure and commercial development in our cities.
	The Budget will ensure that there are opportunities for all as we recover from recession, and no one will be left behind. We will support low-income households by increasing the national minimum wage to £5.93, and we will increase support for families. We will extend the young person's guarantee beyond March 2011 to ensure that young people continue to be guaranteed training, work experience or a future jobs fund job if they cannot find work within six months. Everyone should have the opportunity to work and to thrive in their job, and no one should be left to a life on benefits. Today, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has published a Command Paper that sets out how we will guarantee help for people who do not find employment after two years and how we will introduce more individual and personalised help to people who are looking for a job.
	In the recession of the 1990s, repossessions soared and the building industry took years to recover. Last year, we committed more than £2 billion to building an additional 20,000 new affordable homes for rent and low-cost sale and 20,000 homes on privately developed sites. The Opposition opposed the measures that will create and protect 45,000 jobs and 3,000 apprenticeships. When we made it a condition that apprenticeships should be created when public money is used to build new housing, the shadow Minister for Housing said it was "ridiculous" and "counter-productive". Housing investment of £7.5 billion, over two years, will fund the building of up to 112,000 affordable homes to rent and buy and about 15,000 private sector homes. It will also support an estimated 160,000 jobs directly in the construction and related industries and will create 3,000 apprenticeships, as I have said.

John Denham: My hon. Friend, who chairs that Select Committee, makes an important point. I am not aware of a single voice in the housing industry who believes that investment in housing should have been cut last year. It is fair, however, to point out that, in January 2009, the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), the Leader of the Opposition, called for a cut of more than £1 billion in my Department's budget, nearly all of which-about £800 million-would have fallen on the housing programme. If the official Opposition's policies had been followed, far from building more houses, as we have done, there would have been fewer houses.
	It would be interesting to find out whether any hon. Member believes that the country would be stronger today if those thousands of homes had not been started and if the thousands of people employed to build them had been out of work. I cannot see a single Member in the Chamber who thinks that the country would have been better off if we had not invested in those houses, yet the Conservative party's policy was that those houses should not have been built, that people should not have been employed and that apprenticeships should not have been created. All the rolling of eyes in the world cannot get away from the fact that that was, and remains, Conservative party policy. I am pleased that we have created jobs and that we are building homes for families in the future, and that has helped this country to get through the recession.
	Looking to the future, the need for new affordable housing has only been intensified by the recession, so we will need to ensure-we set out how we will do this in the Budget-that local authorities allocate the land needed to support recovery in house building. That is in stark contrast to the approach of the hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman), who wrote to local authorities to urge them to resist plans to allocate land for housing, although that has been widely condemned by everyone associated with housing and the construction industry. Withdrawing the fiscal stimulus early, as the Conservatives propose, would cut house building by perhaps half, because 40 to 45 per cent. of all recent new-starts have depended on public investment.
	We need to take further measures to boost the housing market. We are introducing a two-year stamp duty holiday for first-time buyers for homes costing up to £250,000, which will help nine out of 10 first-time buyers. However, to pay for that, we will introduce an additional 5 per cent. stamp duty rate for homes costing more than £1 million-that is a fair approach. By reforming the council house finance system, we will let councils fund and run their own local housing stock. Some 10 per cent. extra will be released for maintenance so that homes do not fall below the decent homes standard again, and capacity will be provided to build 10,000 new council homes a year by 2014-15.
	The Government believe that cutting the deficit does not mean damaging the front-line services on which people rely. The Budget continued our commitment to make £11 billion of savings a year by 2012-13 through greater efficiency and streamlining government, which includes £8 billion of savings set out in the operational efficiency programme. Local government can deliver savings of £2.1 billion towards that total in areas including greater collaborative procurement, increased back-office efficiency and the greater use of shared services. Up to £100 million can be saved by reducing energy usage in local authorities. My Department will identify savings of £200 million to be delivered in 2012-13, including through operational efficiency, work to reform our arm's length bodies, and a new approach to the regional tier of government.
	Our public services must be as efficient, responsive and citizen-focused as possible. Through Total Place we are establishing the most radical changes in the delivery of public services for many years. We have high expectations of our public services. We want higher quality services that are more tailored to individual needs but more cost-effective, but not the bleak vision of the Conservative party's proposals for Ryanair councils under which people pay once in council tax and again in top-up charges for a decent service.

John Denham: The answer, of course, is that action to produce efficiency savings is already well under way. In the current spending review-we are about to enter its third year-there is £35 billion-worth of efficiency savings. More than £5 billion of that will come from the local government sector, for which I am responsible. The programme of making efficiency savings is well established and will continue to develop; next year, we will continue to increase the savings that we make. Clearly, some savings take more time than that to be put in place. The development of greater shared services cannot be done on day one; these things have to be planned. That is why the Government have in place a credible programme of efficiency savings that we are delivering now, in this spending review, and we have set out further operational efficiency savings in the Budget. I think that the right hon. and learned Gentleman will give the Government credit for the consistency with which we have approached the drive for efficiency savings across local government and other public services.
	Total Place has demonstrated the great value that can be gained for citizens and taxpayers by putting the customer at the heart of service design, and by working together to improve the outcomes of services and eliminate waste and duplication. In the Budget report, we set out a reduction in targets and in ring-fencing, and further reforms to the inspection system. That will be for all local government, but we have also set out two ways forward for local areas, local government and other public services. First, there is the single offer, where we encourage local authorities and other public services to have a pooled budget and to look at the redesign of services right across their local areas. Secondly, there are areas where local government and other partners may want to take a different approach to, for example, the provision of services for children, offenders or elderly people; again, they will have greater freedom to deliver and design services locally. Those approaches will produce radical changes in service delivery. They will produce better services for people, and they will offer greater possibilities for efficiency savings.
	As we grow through recovery, the Budget sets out the Government's support for business. For expenditure incurred from April 2010, we will double the threshold for the annual investment allowance to £100,000 a year from £50,000. On capital gains tax, we will extend the entrepreneur's relief from the first £1 million to the first £2 million of gains made over a lifetime. We will work with industry on modifications to the enterprise investment scheme and venture capital trusts.
	The Opposition are intent on scrapping capital allowances, but that would cripple the chances of advanced manufacturing developing here in Britain. No wonder the Engineering Employers Federation has said that the move would be "a disaster", and today warned that it would mean businesses having
	"to think twice about investing in the UK."
	We have supported small and medium-sized enterprises throughout the downturn, and will do more to support them in recovery. UK Finance for Growth will oversee more than £4 billion of SME finance products created by the Government to support small and medium enterprises. That includes the growth capital fund, for which £200 million of cornerstone investment has been raised so far from the private sector and Government. There will be a generous temporary increase to the level of small business rate relief. We expect more than 500,000 businesses in England to benefit, many by well over £1,000, and approximately 345,000 businesses will pay no rates. The Opposition have proposed postponing the business rates revaluation, which would increase business rates for 60 per cent. of businesses in this country from April.
	The Budget pledged to reduce the barriers to public procurement for SMEs. If the whole public sector increased the amount of procurement that went to smaller businesses through the supply chain by 15 per cent., it would mean up to an extra £15 billion of business.
	Of course, Britain is home to strong businesses and investment, and is a leading centre for research and innovation. The Government will support innovation in the UK even when finances are tight. The pre-Budget report announced that we would reduce the rate of corporation tax on income from patents to ensure that the UK remains an attractive place for innovative industries. We will invest up to £25 million in the university enterprise capital fund to provide crucial early-stage funding for promoting university innovations. The Budget confirmed £30 million of investment for an institute of web science, a joint venture that is to be based at Southampton and Oxford universities, ensuring that the UK remains at the forefront of internet development.
	The future economy depends on the students of today, and we are taking a long-term view of growth by investing in skills in the Budget. A £270 million modernisation fund will enable universities to identify and deliver efficiencies over the next four years and fund 20,000 extra undergraduate places on courses starting in 2010-11. The Budget also provides updates on wide-ranging improvements to enterprise education, including £15 million to extend it to further education colleges and primary schools.
	The future economy must be a low-carbon economy. Taking action on climate change will generate new business opportunities and highly skilled jobs in the sectors of the future, and modernising the UK's energy infrastructure will be the key to laying the foundations for sustainable growth. The green investment bank will support new energy projects, with an initial focus on offshore wind electricity generation, and we will help millions of people save money and energy by developing pay-as-you-save financing arrangements.
	That is a positive programme for our country, but the Opposition-with their opposition to industrial activism, regional development agencies and regional investment, and their plans to abolish allowances, reduce reliefs and penalise firms that want to make serious investment in the low-carbon industries currently developing here in the UK-do not share it.
	The Budget that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor introduced last week is realistic and optimistic. It is realistic about the challenges ahead, which is why it sets out a clear plan to more than halve the deficit over four years; and it is optimistic about Britain's strengths, which have seen us through recession and will build a better economy through infrastructure and growth in recovery. That is why we will not heed the calls from the Opposition to cut now and risk recovery; to cut now and risk a double-dip recession; or to cut public spending, just as they did in the 1980s and '90s, when the recession was still under way, so that unemployment kept rising for months and years after the recession finished. We will not heed their calls to undermine business confidence and threaten jobs. That is the Conservative way, which failed the country before and would do so again.
	I have outlined the Government's plans for growth, and for supporting new jobs, businesses, families and the economy. We must secure the recovery, not put it at risk; we must support new industries and future jobs; we must protect front-line services, not cut them; and we must stand up for the many, not the few. I commend this Budget to the House.

Caroline Spelman: In due course. If the hon. Gentleman does not mind, I shall develop the argument about the business community.
	The Secretary of State, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman heard, said that he had helped business, but all the Chancellor had to offer struggling business was a temporary increase in the small business rate relief. That year-long measure will be a tiny grain of comfort to small businesses, which have seen business rates soar as a result of the botched revaluation. The fact is that the burden of business rates is rising, not falling. It has driven many businesses to the wall, and when the new bills are issued it will sound the death knell for many more.
	Since Labour came to power the average business rate bill has risen, from £6,500 to more than £12,000. Even when that figure is adjusted to real-terms increases, it is still the case that the increase has by far and away outstripped retail prices index inflation. Measures such as ending empty property rate relief and forcing through questionable revaluations have all tightened the ratchet on struggling businesses. Is it not telling that, according to the Budget, business rate revenues are forecast to rise by £1 billion-an increase of 4.2 per cent? How can that possibly be described as helping business? The cost of the temporary increase in rate relief is a fraction of that, coming in at £210 million.
	On that basis-let us be very clear-this Budget was proof positive, were it needed, that this Government's priority is increasing tax on businesses. Just as the increase in national insurance is a tax on jobs, which we have pledged to reverse, so the business rate revaluation is a tax on growth. In just a few days' time, the latest business rate revaluation will come into effect. It will send bills soaring through the roof because it is based on the peak of the commercial property market. It will make many businesses no longer eligible for small business rate relief.

Caroline Spelman: The rating revaluation was based on commercial property prices in April 2008-pre-credit crunch. How can the Secretary of State possibly claim that its basis is fair or realistic in the difficult environment that we face today? Revaluations are designed to be tax-neutral, but our experience of the Government's implementing a rating revaluation in Wales was that it was not tax- neutral. I therefore stand by the reasons why we would oppose such a flawed revaluation.

Caroline Spelman: No; I have replied to the Secretary of State's intervention.
	By retrospectively charging five years of back-dated business rates for struggling port businesses, Ministers are jeopardising firms, jobs, livelihoods and the very viability of many coastal towns. Labour Members will know that to be true if they have port businesses in their area. It is a disgrace. Ministers should stop squabbling among themselves about who is to blame for the mess, and get back to the drawing board and start again. A Conservative Government will call for an immediate halt to the process and consult industry about what steps can be taken to address the matter.
	I have to say that taxing jobs and businesses so that they are unable to compete is a very odd way of trying to stimulate economic growth, but is that not the logical consequence of a Government who have long favoured taxing enterprise rather than tackling waste? In few cases has the tax grab been felt more painfully than with the council tax. It was telling that the first announcement on Budget day was yet another increase in council tax, taking the average band D property up to just short of £1,500 a year.
	Let us be clear about the background to the latest rise in council tax. When Labour came to power, it inherited a local tax system that worked. As the then Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions put it in 1998,
	"it is working well, has been widely accepted and is generally well understood."
	At that time, people paid £751 a year on a band D home. Now they are paying more than twice that, and it is one of the most unpopular taxes they have to pay. Since 1997 council tax has doubled, while front-line services such as bin collections have halved. Does it not stand to reason that people are furious about the extent to which Ministers have abused the council tax? All the eye-catching announcements in Whitehall have too often left council tax payers to foot the bill, one of the most recent and notorious examples being the unfunded and ostensibly uncosted personal care policy announced by the Prime Minister. It is small wonder that this year's council tax increase went down so badly, although someone living in Scotland will benefit from yet another council tax freeze. That will mean that the average bill for a band D property in Scotland is nearly £300 less than for a similar property in England. I do not have a problem with Scotland having a council tax freeze, but what confounds me and people up and down the country is why Labour Ministers will not let people in England have the same deal.
	We have pledged to provide funding so that people in England can have the same council tax freeze as people in Scotland, yet time and time again the Government rule that out. Why? The reason is set out clearly on page 193 of the Red Book. Council tax receipts are forecast to rise by £1 billion this year. That is an additional £1 billion being taken out of the pockets of hard-working families and poured into the gaping black hole of the Government's finances.
	What is even more frightening is that the £1 billion figure is just the tip of the iceberg. We know, Ministers know, and most importantly the public know, that Ministers are preparing for an intrusive council tax revaluation and rebanding exercise, which will punish people for making improvements to their homes or just enjoying a room with a view. It has already happened in Wales, where four times as many homes moved up a band as moved down one. Now, thanks to parliamentary answers that prove the point I am making, we know that the same is planned for England unless we have a change of Government. I say that with certainty as we have made clear our pledge to scrap the revaluation. The combination of our council tax freeze and aborting the revaluation could save up to £500 a year in tax on a typical family home.

Caroline Spelman: I have got evidence by asking the business community, of course. The hon. Lady comes from the south-west. If she turns around and speaks to the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew), I think she will find he would be prepared to point out that Gloucester is nearer the Scottish border than it is to Penzance, and the scale of the south-west region is almost unmanageable. Indeed, it might interest the hon. Lady to know that when I went on a fact-finding mission to the north-east, where, I have always been led to believe, there is the strongest appetite for a regional development agency, I discovered a distinct difference of view in the business community. People in Newcastle are quite fond of their RDA, because it is located in Newcastle, but the business communities in Sunderland and the Tees valley were quick to tell me that they do not see much activity to help them.
	Geography is important, and I reiterate that economic partnerships that reflect natural economic boundaries and shared interests will serve the community best. Those changes would offer an exciting opportunity to improve how we develop local growth. We have an opportunity to sharpen the tools at our disposal by giving the best support through focused, efficient and accountable enterprise partnerships. We do not have those at the moment; instead, we have a comprise, whereby RDAs are unwieldy, overburdened and unaccountable. The Government's last-gasp affection for them owes more to political scaremongering than to any desire to find the best way to support local economies. That is the old-fashioned politics of division, and it is holding us back.
	We need the economies in different parts of the country to be performing at the very top of their game. If our country is to stand any chance of catching up with our competitors, we need the engine of our national economy firing on all cylinders, and at the moment it is misfiring. Parts of the country are falling well short of their potential, and we should face up to that fact. We are seeing the impact of that on growth and aspiration.
	Under this Government, 26,000 fewer new homes a year have been built than under the previous Conservative Government; home ownership is at its lowest for 20 years; the number of first-time buyers is at its lowest since records began; and the rate of new housing-both social and private-is at its lowest since world war two. That is a symptom of our planning system being broken. The system lacks democratic accountability and environmental sustainability, and it is holding back growth and fostering political alienation. Members on both sides of the House will know that from their postbags. We believe that we can do better by reforming the planning system so that it is more accountable and efficient, and far more capable of delivering the new homes that our country so desperately needs.

Caroline Spelman: The hon. Lady fails to understand that I was talking about the entire 13-year period that her party has been in power. Even before the recession and the credit crunch, the rate of house building was below what it was when the Conservatives were last in Government, and the rate of social house building was half what it was during the last 13 years of the Conservative Administration. This might be unpalatable, but for the hon. Lady's greater benefit I hope she will allow me to reiterate that peacetime house building is at its lowest since 1924; that there are now 26,000 fewer new homes a year than under the Conservatives, taken as an average over the time that Labour has been in office; that home ownership is at its lowest for 20 years; and that we have the lowest number of first-time buyers since 1970. There may be a variety of reasons for those things, but I suspect that they are not entirely unconnected to the fact that we have had nine different Housing Ministers in the time that her party has overseen house building in our nation.
	The Conservatives believe that we can do better. To begin with, we will get rid of the arbitrary and meaningless targets that are conceived in Whitehall and forced on local communities. That top-down, one-size-fits-all approach has toxified the planning system, which has become a war zone in which communities are pitched against regional quangos, often resulting in deadlock. It has led to the green belt being torn up and urban green spaces, such as back gardens, being replaced with blocks of flats that are well beyond the pockets of the people on the housing list who so desperately need the housing.
	The number-chasing culture has failed to deliver the kind of affordable homes that young families desperately need. Instead, it has yielded a glut of unsold city- centre luxury apartments and tightly packed units of accommodation that lack the car parking and outside space needed for a young family. That is why the time has come for power to be returned to local people, with the help of those they elect, so that they can define the scale, location and type of new development. It is about drawing people into the decision-making process and giving them a proper platform to be heard. That has to be a more effective way of getting the right kind of homes built in the right places, but we need to give people a stake in local growth. Too often communities feel all the pain, but none of the gain to be had from growth.
	We want to change that by matching the council tax raised on new homes for six years-and recognising how we need to increase social housing, we will match it to the tune of 125 per cent. for affordable housing.

Caroline Spelman: I know that the hon. Gentleman is interested in local government, housing and planning, and I commend to him our recently published Green Paper on planning as it makes it clear that in the absence of a local plan, there will be a presumption in favour of sustainable development. I am confident that that will have the effect of getting the homes built that are so desperately needed. These substantial financial incentives, combined with national affordable housing programme grants to help to subsidise construction, and the introduction of local housing trusts, will deliver substantial amounts of affordable housing.
	The objective of reforming the planning system has to be to make it fairer, faster and more efficient. That is as important for infrastructure as for any other form of development. The current Infrastructure Planning Commission does not meet those criteria, which is why we will improve the system by turning the IPC into a specialised infrastructure unit within the Planning Inspectorate. That will deliver real political accountability and ensure a smooth, efficient transition for infrastructure projects already in train. Without those changes, vital decisions that we need to enhance our country's infrastructure risk being bogged down in legal challenges-from judicial review in the High Court to the European Court of Justice.
	We also propose national policy statements-debated here-which will speed up the planning system, while reducing the scope for legal challenges. These statements will avoid planning inquiries getting bogged down on issues of policy, and focus on specific planning considerations such as scale and location. For projects with national significance, crossing many local authorities, such as High Speed 2, we would use hybrid Bills in Parliament.
	These reforms are vital to driving forward the pace of growth and infrastructure throughout our country. They will speed up the planning process to avoid planning inquiries taking years, and ensure that there are proper democratic checks and balances. The changes that we are proposing are the changes that will get our economy moving again. They are the changes that will kick start growth and development. They are the changes our country needs, and the sooner the country has the opportunity to vote for that change, the sooner we can get Britain working again.

Richard Caborn: In common, I think, with several other Members who will contribute today, this will possibly be my last speech in the House, after 27 years of representing Sheffield, Central, and after five years before that as a Member of the European Parliament. I was first elected to public office, as an MEP, in 1979, having left school at 15 years of age to start my engineering apprenticeship at the company that is now Forgemasters-a great company that has recently been in the news, and to which I shall return a little later.
	I warmly welcome the Budget, like many of us who have been championing manufacture and wealth creation for many years. We see it as a Budget that recognises the need for the economy to be rebalanced, with a greater proportion of wealth creation being achieved through manufacturing. Its measures will help us to continue to take the country along that rebalancing journey.
	The Budget's £2.5 billion one-off growth package is very important, particularly for areas such as Sheffield. There will be investment in the creative industries, digital communications, the medipark and the advanced manufacturing park. That is a reflection of recent policy, particularly the new industrial strategy introduced by the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills when he returned from Europe-I think his experiences as a European Commissioner must have had an effect.
	I want to remind the House, however, that Sheffield has been modernising and repositioning its economy for more than a decade. We have been modernising to meet the challenges of the globalised world of the 21st century, with our two outstanding universities, a very strong further education college, industrial and commercial sectors that want to work in partnership, and the support of Yorkshire Forward, our regional development agency. We have developed, through those very strong partnerships, centres of excellence such as the medipark, the cultural industries, digital Sheffield and our advanced manufacturing park. The Budget will strengthen all four of those major activities, and those areas will be major centres of employment and wealth creation in the future.
	Let us consider just one of those, the advanced manufacturing park, which is closely linked to the university of Sheffield under the leadership of Professor Keith Ridgway. The project was set up 10 years ago to address the productivity and the competitiveness of our aerospace industry, which is a sector that has an order book of more than £40 billion and that employs well over 100,000 people, many of whom are employed in the skills sector. The park has grown to be one of the most respected advanced manufacturing parks in the world.
	The recent investment by Rolls-Royce and the Government in a nuclear manufacturing park, which is to be located alongside the aerospace facilities, will enable the techniques and innovation that have been developed over the years in the aerospace industry to be transferred to the nuclear sector, thus enabling that development to be a smart partner for the nuclear build programme. This is an area of great potential for British manufacturing and technology, addressing the green agenda not just here, but internationally. Twelve nuclear power stations could be built in the UK at the cost of about £60 billion. That is estimated to be about 4 per cent. of the world's order book. Again, that development is encouraged by the announcement in the Budget.
	I said that we had been working on this project for more than a decade. In fact, it was 10 years ago that I had dinner in the House-in the Churchill Room-with Phil Condit, then chief executive of Boeing, and Professor Keith Ridgway. From that dinner came the start of a £6 million investment to be made in the intellectual property of the university of Sheffield and the vision of Keith Ridgway. I facilitated that dinner and I am proud to have been involved in that project ever since.
	Today, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and many other companies involved in the supply chain are involved in the park, with some of the work being done on blue skies technology and research and development. As I said, the nuclear new build programme and developments in the industry have attracted a good partnership between the Government and Rolls-Royce, which has resulted in a £35 million investment in that nuclear development.
	In 2008, I organised another dinner in the House, which was similar to the one that took place in the Churchill Room 10 years ago. It enabled representatives of five universities, five captains of industry-Graham Honeyman, chief executive of Forgemasters, was there-and two Secretaries of State to discuss how universities, Government and industry could work together to exploit the nuclear renaissance for the UK for many years to come.
	On Sunday,  The Sunday Times accused me of acting improperly in organising that dinner-the dinner that brought together universities, Government and industry to discuss how we could act collectively in the best interests of UK plc. Throughout my 27 years in the House, I have been doing just-acting in the best interests of the UK, be it through my post as Chair of the Trade and Industry Committee, in my role for the past 14 years as trustee of the Industry and Parliament Trust or through my contacts with the trade unions, employers' organisations and industrial groups. Those are all people who want British industry to grow and prosper. That is my record and I am proud of it. If it is wrong in the eyes of  The Sunday Times, I plead guilty.
	A few years ago, the House passed the Freedom of Information Act. The press were rightly at the forefront of the demand for it, but now, when the press use misleading evidence obtained through sting operations-this is evidence that could not be used in court-they believe that it is their right to keep it from those whom they accuse. My lawyers twice requested the information that appeared in  The Sunday Times, but they did not receive any response. What people read in  The Sunday Times was a deliberate fabrication, which was designed to mislead. I do not believe that we have a level playing field, and when the House returns it ought seriously to consider the balance between freedom of information and what the press are doing through their sting operations and not allowing those whom they accuse in the newspapers, and the nation, to challenge information that cannot even be used in the courts of this land.
	Returning to the Budget, as I said, I started at Forgemasters as an engineer apprentice at the age of 15. Last week, on Friday, the MPs in Sheffield, the two vice-chancellors, the further education colleges and Yorkshire Forward met to discuss the skills agenda of the future, from our skill shortages, which could be an impediment to growth, to the quality of training needed to ensure that the aerospace and nuclear supply chains are up to scratch. We have concerns, although we warmly welcome the announcement of the promise on the skills agenda. The budget for this area should be increased, and we believe we need a clear focus on delivery. That is something we are working on as a result of that meeting, and we hope to produce some ideas about delivery, which we think is very important, and to remove some of the confusion around it. For the record, I shall continue to be involved in that when I have left Parliament.
	Finally, I want to conclude on the subject of a significant investment in Sheffield Forgemasters-a 16,000 tonne forging press, which will be one of the largest forging presses, if not the largest, in the world. It has taken nearly three years to develop that plan and bring it to fruition, and I want to put on record my thanks to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, his Ministers and special advisers, along with Tim Stone from PricewaterhouseCoopers. They have worked very effectively to make this happen. As for Sheffield Forgemasters, it has been said that this would not have happened had it not been for the vision of people such as Graham Honeyman, Tony Pedder and Peter Birtles, but there was also strong support from the work force. Half of the company is now owned by the work force and the pride in those young people, particularly the 70 apprentices who work there, has to be seen to be believed. That has put us in a unique position at the beginning of the supply chain worldwide and for the nuclear new build. That, I believe, is very important if we are to capitalise and see an industrial renaissance coming out of that nuclear renaissance, particularly in engineering and manufacturing.
	That was a great day, and it was great to be involved when that £160 million investment was announced by the Secretary of State a couple of weeks ago. The very first job that I completed while serving my time as an apprentice and coming out of that was the building of a 4,000-tonne forging press, so, having represented Sheffield, Central and Forgemasters for 27 years, it will be very pleasing to see a forging press four times greater than that and the investment that is being made.
	This is probably my last speech to the House, and I say with honesty that in my 31 years as an elected representative, I have never taken a single penny outside the salary that I have earned and been paid. It was only when I decided a couple of years ago to stand down and announced my retirement that a number of companies came to me and asked whether I would be a consultant and help them, probably as a non-executive director- never as a lobbyist. I was approached as someone who has been in the national institutions and who has also been an engineer. I am proud to have done that and I will continue to work for the betterment of British manufacturing, and particularly engineering, in which I believe very strongly, having had a father and a grandfather who were in the engineering industry-indeed, it runs through our DNA. It would be good to see the press talking this side of British industry up rather than talking it down.

John Hutton: It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) and, indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Central (Mr. Caborn). They are two fine Members of Parliament who have done a great job for their constituents and who command a great deal of respect on both sides of the House. The fact that they will not be here after the election will be a cause of great sadness for many who know those two fine, honourable Members well.
	Let me begin my remarks by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer not just on the manner in which he delivered the Budget statement, but on its content. He has had to bear a very heavy burden of responsibility in the discharge of his great office of state. He did not have long to think about how to share the proceeds of economic growth. Instead, he had to think very carefully about how our country would emerge in good shape from the deepest, most savage and severe recession of three generations. In trying to set that course, he has earned a lot of respect on both sides of the House. His instincts are sound and his judgments have been right. I think that is what history will say of him.
	To borrow the medical metaphor that the hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne) used, the economy is at least now in the recovery position. Bearing in mind the stewardship argument that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has just deployed, it is incumbent on us not to do anything to jeopardise the economic recovery. That is the first and most important fact, principle or statement about the Budget. The flow of economic data is finally looking a bit more cheerful: unemployment is falling, inflation is falling and borrowing is down. Growth has returned to the economy. Those are all positive signs that there is now light at the end of what has been a very dark and long tunnel.
	As I have said, our big job is not to jeopardise that recovery. I therefore welcome in particular what my right hon. Friend the Chancellor said in his statement about targeting further and additional help and support at businesses and wealth creators. That is the right thing to do with any discretionary additional spend that we have, because it will be on the decisions that those businesses-mainly small businesses-make in the next few years that prospects for substantial economic growth will depend. I therefore welcome the doubling of the investment allowance and the expansion of the entrepreneurs' relief from capital gains tax. I particularly welcome the extension of the time to pay scheme for business taxes. Many right hon. and hon. Members will know that that scheme has become an important source of credit for many businesses. I understand that it is benefiting nearly 200,000 companies. There is a danger, of which the Treasury and the Revenue will be aware, that the scheme could be abused, and we have to be alert to that danger, but it is a very important new initiative. I also welcome-I am sorry that the hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) did not do the same-the extension of council tax reliefs for small businesses. All those small measures together form a very useful and helpful package.
	I particularly welcome the focus that was evident in the Budget statement on the new policy of industrial activism. Many right hon. and hon. Members will probably assume the foetal position when anyone talks about a new industrial strategy, and I understand the nervousness that is felt about that policy, which is redolent of a bygone time when we got basically every judgment wrong and in the process wasted a huge amount of scarce public resource. However, I do not detect a likelihood of our repeating those failures; I do not think that will be the case.
	When I was Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, it used to irritate me enormously to hear many commentators opine on the fact that Britain was somehow a post-industrial society. No, we are not. We are the fifth-largest economy in the world and a great trading and commercial power. We should aim to retain that position, but we have no prospect whatever of doing that if we do not, and we are not aware of the need to, support businesses, particularly the small companies that have the potential to be the great employers of the future. That should be our focus. We should keep capital allowances; it is a false economy to play fast and loose with that kind of business support. We should aim to remain a great industrial society. That is what I see in the economy and in my right hon. Friend's statement.
	The new finance for growth investment corporation might also prove to be a useful development, and I note that Simon Walker says that it will be good news for British businesses. As many people will know, Simon is chief executive of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association.
	I have to tell my Front-Bench colleagues in all honesty that it is probably just as well that I will not be here after the next election because I will take some persuading before I lend my support to the notion of the new credit adjudicator. It is hard to imagine how we could create a situation in which the banks are legally forced to lend. I do not understand that, and if we have learned one thing from the recession it is that we should all have a better appreciation of the level of risk, and we should let the banks decide what that is. I do not think that the proposal is a particularly good idea, and I hope that more work will be done on it.
	I agreed with the remarks that were made about the need to cut the budget deficit. That is, by some distance, the biggest challenge faced by the House, and the new House of Commons will have the task of beginning to address it. We have started to identify the things that must change, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government set out helpful measures that we could implement, such as tackling waste and inefficiency. It is probably common ground that the next comprehensive spending review will be the toughest for a generation; it will certainly need to be.
	When the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) said that the biggest challenge facing us in the next Parliament will be reducing the deficit, he was only half right, and the bit that he got wrong is the thing that worries me most. Yes, we must reduce the deficit, but we must do so in a way that does not jeopardise the recovery, compromise the quality of public services or lead to higher unemployment. I am afraid that everything that I have heard from the Conservative party suggests that if he forms a Government, the next House of Commons will make precisely those mistakes.
	Obviously, I am the first to say that we must have the right balance between levels of taxation and spending, and given the economic conditions that we have been through, it is hardly surprising that we are not in balance-we are a considerable way away. However, we have been through extraordinary times that have called for vital additional public support for the economy, especially the banking sector. That is why I am worried about the 50 per cent. higher rate of income tax. Labour Members must emphasise that that is a temporary measure, because it is unhelpful and wrong to send people the signal that the state will claw back more than half their earnings. There is an argument that the rate can be justified in the short term, but it cannot be a defensible long-term position. There are no votes in it, and no moral high ground can be occupied by adopting a taxation policy with punitive elements.
	When we announced the 1 per cent. increase in national insurance a year or so ago, we rightly emphasised that it would be a temporary measure, and we must get back to that argument. It would be bad to load the increase into the long term. We should not be putting a tax on jobs, and although there is an argument for the approach in the short term, it is not sustainable and we must get beyond it.
	When one looks at all the numbers flying around in relation to the Conservative proposals set out today, one detects that there has been a huge dose of double counting. The arithmetic that has been set out to justify the changes does not stack up-it would blow up in our face-and would risk increasing the deficit, not reducing it. The Conservative party has picked up the bad habits that we learned in opposition, as the joy of opposition is being able to spend the same pound several times over. Those in government only get to spend that pound once, and the Conservative numbers do not add up. We can only spend the money once and my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has, essentially, already spent it.
	I want to make two points before I shut up for the last time in this place. We have all heard the arguments about efficiencies in public services, and those of us who have held ministerial office have carried out the tough job of trying to extract them from spending Departments that do not like to give up any resource. Getting the savings out is always harder than anticipated. I think that there should be more outsourcing, and there will need to be a much tougher approach on procurement and streamlining back offices. That is common ground between both Front-Bench teams, which is fine, but it will be harder than people think. That is why I conclude that the only way we can be confident that we can reduce the public deficit as quickly as possible without compromising the quality of public services is fundamentally to change the basic delivery model for some of the public services.
	For example, the health service consumes more than £120 billion of public resources, but we spend a large dollop of that money completely inefficiently by providing bad pathways of care, especially for people with long-term and chronic diseases. Those people end up being treated inappropriately in the most high-cost settings and they are not provided with especially good care. We must change all that, but it will be difficult and will require strong leadership from politicians. It fills me with regret that Conservative Members will go around the country saying that we cannot change this or that part of the health service, because it has to change if we are to save money without compromising quality and to deliver better outcomes for our constituents.
	My final point relates to better regulation, which was not something for which I thought that I would have ministerial responsibility. The subject has disappointed many Ministers who, like me, have struggled with the brief, such as my right hon. Friend the Minister for Business, Innovation and Skills-a fine Minister who is currently sitting on the Front Bench. We and the previous Government passed legislation in that regard, but better regulation is not about legislation. This place can pass umpteen Bills, but they will not make a ha'p'orth of difference unless the Government change the culture of how they set about imposing new burdens on business. I am a fan of regulatory budgets, and I hope that the next Government-if they are a Labour Government, I hope that my Government will do this-will, for the first time, put a real cap on the additional cost burdens that we ask businesses, and especially small businesses, to accept in our pursuit of public policy goals. There must be a limit, and 19th-century regulatory approaches cannot meet the needs of a modern 21st economy, so we need to do more.
	This is my last speech in the House of Commons. Many people will say, "Thank God for that." It has been a great honour to serve my constituents and I have had a fantastic time in doing so. Our constituents probably feel disappointed by all of us in this Parliament, so we owe it to them to do a job of work to rebuild their trust. This is a great country and we believe in some great things. I hope that Members of Parliament in the next House of Commons will stand up for those great values that have made Britain such a great country in the world.

David Curry: Since we are having a succession of valedictories, I shall try not to be sentimental, maudlin or moralistic. We are talking about the Budget, however, so perhaps I may begin by talking about the two great elephants in the room that have not been raised: the great debate about the value of the renminbi that is taking place in the United States and China, and Germany's role in assisting the European economy. Those two things will have more impact on growth in the United Kingdom than anything mentioned in the Budget, and we should occasionally put our decisions in the context of those wider questions.
	I want to talk about public services because I note that one of the Government's super-pledges relates to safeguarding public services. My party uses similar terminology, but my problem is that I do not know what that means. What a wonderful word "safeguard" is; it is rather like the word "appropriate" because it can mean anything. At best the word is misleading, and at worst it is probably mendacious, because no public services will be safeguarded in the sense that they will be immune from pressure over the next few years.
	The crunch for local government will come not this year but in 2011-12 and 2012-13, because the comprehensive spending review takes care of the present year. However, if there is a cut in grant of something like 5 per cent., which is not an unreasonable assumption, given the pressures that we are under and the fact that local government is not one of the "safeguarded" services, serious decisions will have to be taken and there will be serious consequences. Recession drives up demand. It drives up demand for free school meals. It drives up demand from self-carers who fall back on welfare because they can no longer finance their care, and it drives up the cost of home-school transport. Those are only three areas in which recession inevitably pushes up costs.
	We must also consider demographic demand-we do not need to go into the familiar argument of what an ageing population means-and the fact that recession leads to income being constrained from things such as tourism, and car parking and planning charges. Many local authorities depend heavily on those charges to maintain a relatively modest council tax, or at least to mitigate its impact. However, the council tax is not a buoyant tax. We have already heard about house building, and a low level of house building means that there is no buoyancy in the council tax. Local government will therefore face a huge problem, even with the best will in the world.
	If one then looks at the longer term, however, and considers the three big factors driving costs, the situation becomes much more difficult. First, there are the consequences of what we might call the baby P issue. Whenever there is one of these ghastly episodes where a child has suffered appalling mistreatment and has died, the impact on the reactions of social services departments is bound to come through, in the sense of them playing safe and not taking risks, and that enhances demand-and rightly so; one understands that. Secondly, there is the demographic time bomb of adult care, plus the special demands of high-dependency cases, which will now impact much more severely. Thirdly, there is the old question of the waste and landfill targets; as they are winched up, the costs for local government get higher and higher.
	Those are three huge, emotional, high-volume and high-cost issues. Add that to the recession and we see that local government is facing the perfect storm. We can talk until we are blue in the face about safeguarding public services, but they will not be safeguarded. Nobody can, and nobody will, safeguard them. Some services can be hit harder than others, but even then we have to be careful, because there is no point in saying, "We're going to make a special case of the health service" if the consequence is that social services get particularly badly hit. So many of the outcomes in health depend on effective social services. They have to be treated together. If we dislocate the pair of them, what is gained on the swings will be lost on the roundabout. It is easy enough to talk about co-operation between health and social services; it is easy to talk about primary care trusts and social services working together, and there are some outstandingly good places where that has happened, such as Hertfordshire, but it is much easier to talk about it than to deliver it everywhere.
	I was a local government Minister, and was regarded as a rather benign and tolerant one, compared with what came after. It is wonderful how, in retrospect, one gains an aura of tolerance. I hope that that continues throughout one's career. As we are in a reflective mood, I should like to make two points about which I feel very strongly indeed. First, we must not let the whole notion of devolution slide under the pressure of the recession and the recovery. The pressure on Government is always to try to keep control-to say that other people cannot be relied on to exercise the same sort of control that the Government can. Given the volume of local government expenditure as a proportion of gross domestic product, it is understandable that that instinct seems to burn deeply in the heart of Government, but there are very good arguments against it. The main one is not ideological; it is that Britain is now the most centralised state in western Europe, and it does not work very well. It is an efficiency argument.
	If one sits on the Public Accounts Committee, as I have for a number of years, one sees, week after week, a parade of catastrophically bad spending by the state. It is all very well talking about the active state, or the benign state, but it is a jolly inefficient state most of the time. We need to look hard at passing that power down to elected representatives-to representative government. We should be careful about empowering non-representative groups, because there can be tyranny on a small scale, just as there can on a big scale. Those on the receiving end do not care whether the tyrant is big or little; the fact is that the actions are tyrannical. Let us pass power down to representative government.
	I hope that when my party comes to look at regional structures, it will do what I think is a very conservative thing: invite local government to bid, with a price, for the powers that we want to remove from other organisations. Groups should get together and say, "Yes, we could deliver the competences of the regional development agency," or "We could deliver the competence in training and skills." I never understood why the RDAs were not given the competence of training and skills, given that economic development is supposed to be at the core of their purpose. Let us trust local government to bid for those powers, to say how it will deliver them, and to say how much that will cost. We should then let it get on and do that. That is an accountable system.
	My second reflection is perhaps somewhat more controversial. One of the reasons why I came into politics was a feeling that my generation had inherited a country that was in rapid transformation and, in many ways, had not come to terms with it. Britain was the sick man of Europe in my youth, when I was at university. When I was 18, in 1962, Dean Acheson, the American Secretary of State, made a speech in which he said:
	"Great Britain has lost an Empire and not yet found a role."
	I am leaving this House 48 years after Dean Acheson made that speech, and I believe that that dilemma for the United Kingdom remains unresolved.
	We cling to an increasingly asymmetric relationship with the United States. I would not want us not to have a particular relationship with the United States, but increasingly we cannot sustain it on the basis of that old idea that something very special is at its heart. The current President has less interest in that idea than some-perhaps less than any other-of his predecessors whose roots went back to Europe.
	We are perennially reluctant Europeans, yet no sane party has come up with a plan B on Europe. I look forward to seeing, from the perspective of my greenhouse, the changed reaction towards Europe of Conservative Back Benchers if they sit on the Government Benches, as opposed to the Opposition Benches, given my party leadership's decision to have constructive engagement on Europe, and its extraordinarily elegant and, from my point of view, extremely welcome climbdown on the referendum pledge.
	I know that Europe has huge problems. In a sense, its bluff is being called: how can one create an economic union without the political union that goes with it? But the ability of the Europeans to cobble something together that works is absolutely astonishing. In a sense, there is something rather British about being able to put something together on an improvised basis that manages to carry on.
	We talk about punching above our weight, but a person can only punch above their weight for a certain number of rounds, and then they get flattened. I do not want us to punch above our weight. I want us to work out what our weight is and punch at it. I do not want to go a gram above our weight. We send our young soldiers to die in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we do not have the means to sustain over a long term the total support that means that we can carry through those missions with complete success. If we are honest, we ended up in Iraq, in Basra, not in a glorious episode, but in a somewhat humiliating one. When it comes to the intervention in Afghanistan, I want to be able to say that we will see things through, so that I can say that those young people did not die in vain. If we cannot sustain those operations in the long term, we should not embark on them.
	I would say to an incoming Government: look hard at the UK. Look at us from the outside as well as from the inside. Turn the telescope around sometimes, and look through both ends. What can we really do? What is it reasonable to ask our citizens to sustain? What is the effective power or weight of the United Kingdom in the modern world, where we spend all our time talking about the impact of globalisation? In the end, of course things boil down to budgets and economic performance, but we need to look honestly in the mirror of our national identity and national capability. If we do that, the next Government will perhaps be able to answer the challenge that Dean Acheson set 48 years ago, which, in many ways, has governed my political life.

David Clelland: It is a great honour, indeed a privilege, to follow the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry). He represents the acceptable face of conservatism in this House, particularly on issues of local government. He has proved one of Parliament's most effective speakers, and he will be greatly missed. Like him and colleagues who have preceded me in this debate, I, too, will be leaving at the general election. This is my 25th Budget, and my last speech in a major debate in the House of Commons.
	I spoke to some of my constituents over the weekend about the Budget, and although they did not feel that it was the most exciting one they had ever seen, they accepted it as sensible and right in the circumstances. It is a Budget for the economic times in which we live. It is responsible and designed to aid the recovery.
	It will also be the last Budget before the general election, and the 14th Budget of a Labour Government. There have been many memorable Budgets from this Government, including those that heralded the winter fuel allowance, family and pensioner tax credits, and free bus travel-Budgets that have helped my constituency of Tyne Bridge, and the good people who live there: unemployment has tumbled since 1997; health services have improved; new schools and colleges have been built; educational standards and opportunities have improved for our young people; and housing has been modernised, and new houses provided. Although much more needs to be done, the Government have shown what can be done, given the opportunity, and what they will do in future.
	Only last Friday I attended the launch of the redevelopment of Newcastle's west end, the scene of street riots in the early 1980s, where hundreds of new homes and community facilities will be provided thanks to a Labour Government. The redevelopment of Gateshead quays has seen an influx of new jobs and opportunities -a cultural revolution that has seen a town once described as
	"a dirty back lane leading to Newcastle"
	rise to become internationally renowned for sport and recreation, and its arts and cultural development. All that has taken place under a Labour council and a Labour Government. With the Government's help, hundreds of new homes will be provided on the site of a former freight yard near Gateshead town centre, which itself is being cleared to make way for new shops and housing. Indeed, the only famous-perhaps, infamous-building left to view is the "Get Carter" car park, which still stands, but not for much longer.
	That story can be repeated right across the north-east, where the decline of heavy engineering and coal mining under the previous Conservative Government is being replaced with new opportunities. There are new industries, such as that of Nissan in Sunderland, which will soon develop the first generation of mass-produced electric cars. The production of offshore wind generators will, I hope, soon be boosted by Siemens, which plans a new manufacturing facility that would provide hundreds of new jobs. There is also the potential for clean coal technology and other innovative ideas, such as solid-state lighting systems, green technologies and so on, which are emerging in the region.
	One NorthEast, our regional development agency, is at the centre of that, working with our businesses to develop the north-east's economy. The hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) confirmed that a Conservative Government would abolish One NorthEast, but Conservative candidates on the ground in the north-east do not take that attitude, because they know about the RDA's popularity and tell us that, if the region wants it to remain, it will remain. They have not said how they decide on that, or whether they would have a referendum, but from candidates in the constituencies we hear a different story from that told by Opposition Front Benchers.
	There is still a lot more to do, and all that needs to be added to that is the candid recognition that there is always a lot more to do. Indeed, if there is one thing that we can rely on Governments to do, it is not enough. However, economic recovery and future progress will rely on the public and private sectors working together. That is what Labour has promoted and, to a large degree, achieved: public and private sectors working in harmony and, sometimes, in partnership to provide the services and the prosperity that we all want. First, however, we have to tackle the deficit that has built up during the crisis that we have come through, and it is right that the banks, which sparked the crisis, should now do more to help the recovery by ensuring that small businesses can survive and grow. It is right also that important public services are protected, and that the public sector is not expected to pay for the mistakes of the private sector.
	In the north-east, where the public sector accounts for 53 per cent. of GDP, we know only too well that threats of early and deep cuts in public spending would spell very bad news and threaten the recovery. Although it is true that much has been achieved and improved since 1997, the disparities between the north and south of our country stubbornly remain, much to the frustration of those of us who live in the north. Life in some parts of the south is becoming uncomfortable, with growing congestion and over-population; at the same time, life in parts of the north is made more difficult because the emerging industries and employment opportunities in the south are inaccessible to people, unless they move there and add to its congestion.
	Attempts over the years to attract more business to the north have been frustrated by the concentration in London and the south-east of economic and political power, which is a magnet for development. One way to tackle the problem is to bring the north and south closer together by reducing the time it takes to travel between the two. The Labour Government's proposals to develop a high-speed rail network are a welcome contribution to that process. The development of high-speed rail on the continent has shown that cities that the high-speed network directly serves benefit financially and are advantaged in comparison with those that are not. So if high-speed rail is to contribute to efforts to tackle the north-south divide, surely the areas that are most in need and farthest from the centre of national economic and political influence should be included on the network. It is vital to the north-east of England that the proposed high-speed rail network, not just the proposed spur line, serves the region.
	It is disappointing, however, that otherwise forward-thinking and relatively young Transport Ministers find it so difficult to see beyond conventional rail systems. Surely we cannot be contemplating that, by the end of the 21st century, high-speed rail will still consist of hundreds of tonnes of metal trundling along on steel rails. Our continental competitors are ahead of us in the development of high-speed rail, so instead of taking one small step to catch up, why can our Ministers not take one huge leap, boldly go where none has gone before and develop a real high-speed network that is fit for the 21st century? I refer to maglev: a train carried on magnetic levitation-a British invention, by the way-at speeds of up to 300mph. It makes a mockery of current proposals and would really put Britain ahead of the game for once. Indeed, I recommend that Ministers examine UK Ultraspeed's response to the High Speed 2 report, which makes enlightening reading.
	Other measures in the Budget are a little less headline-grabbing but important to the social life of many constituents. I note that the Prime Minister recently announced the appointment of a pubs Minister, in recognition of the demise of too many local pubs. I had to point out to the new Minister that working men's and other private non-profit-making members' clubs are also going through bad times, and that legislation such as the Licensing Act 2003, Gambling Act 2005 and the smoking ban, however well-meaning, have had a negative and often damaging effect. As a consequence, clubs are struggling and many have either closed or are under the threat of closure.
	Those clubs are more often than not right in the centre and at the heart of our communities. They provide a venue for wedding receptions, funeral receptions, christenings, birthdays and so on, and it is disappointing that the Budget does not give any relief to such valuable community assets. Indeed, increases in duties will aggravate the problem. I am pleased that the pubs Minister has announced that clubs will be included in his deliberations, and that a new inquiry, chaired by my very good friend, the noble Lord Bilston, will look at how clubs can be helped to survive and thrive. I look forward to its conclusions; it could not have a better or more knowledgeable chairman.
	As I said at the beginning of my contribution, this is probably my last speech in a major debate in this House, and I, like my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Central (Mr. Caborn), came here after serving 23 years on the shop floor in heavy engineering. My election to Parliament was a source of pride to my parents, who lived through the war years and the years of austerity. My father was a political animal. He took such a close interest in politics, particularly Labour politics, that he was nicknamed Clem, after Clem Attlee-a name that he liked so much he adopted it for the rest of his life. But he never aspired to political office. My parents were proud not just of me but of our country, where people of modest backgrounds as well as professionals and the wealthy can make it to Parliament. It is vital that we retain that characteristic in the years ahead. Too often these days, people become career politicians after leaving university, and they have little or no knowledge of the real world outside this House.
	I have had the privilege of representing the heart of Tyneside-the people I grew up with. When I go, owing to boundary changes, Tyne Bridge goes also, so it is probably an appropriate time for me to leave. I hope that I have been able to make my mark, however slight, on this place, and that those who arrive after the election not only find the job as fulfilling as I have, but are able to contribute effectively and passionately on behalf of their constituents. I thank my wife and family for their support over the years. It would not have been possible without that. Finally, I wish my successor and the new Parliament well. Being an MP has been a great privilege. I thank my constituents, my party and my union for giving me that opportunity. I hope that I have lived up to it.

John Maples: The purpose of that was to try to do something to stimulate the creation of jobs in the private sector.
	I am concerned about the level of gilt sales that we are indulging in. Over the next four years, according to the Red Book, the deficit will be about £570 billion. Maturities are running at about £40 billion a year. For the last year, all the gilts that the Government issued were sold to the Bank of England, so that will have to be undone over the next three or four years. On the Government's own figures, we are looking at selling £920 billion of gilts over the next four to five years. That is not possible without a major increase in interest rates, a major fall in the currency, or both.
	Another reason why it is important to eliminate the deficit a lot faster is that the private sector cannot recover with these levels of borrowing and taxation, as well as inefficiencies in the use of people in the public sector. That will lead to a lower pound, higher interest rates, and, perhaps, inflation. We have been running an incredibly loose monetary policy alongside the fiscal policy, although that is partly to do with the problems in the banks.
	I got interested in politics in the 1970s because I thought we were getting into terrible trouble on the Government's finances. I came into this place when a Conservative Government were trying to grapple with an inherited deficit of 9 per cent. of gross domestic product, and it looks as though the next Government are going to have to start from a much worse position than that. I fundamentally believe in sound public finance and sound monetary policy. We all know, from our personal life or our business life, that if one is getting into debt and things are not getting any better, the sooner one faces up to the problem and straightens it out, the sooner one's life can get back to normal. Every business man knows this, and we all know it from our own lives. I am sure that we have all had periods when we have taken on debts that we cannot really afford and interest starts to catch up with us, which begins to mean that we cannot spend money on things we want to spend it on. The sooner one grapples with that problem and resolves it, the sooner one gets back to normal.
	Part of the adjustment to this process will fall on the public sector work force, and I am afraid that it will be a very painful time. However, the Government have increased the public sector work force from 5.2 million to 6.1 million during their period in office. The pay bill is a quarter of public spending, and last year it went up by 3.8 per cent. A lot of those people are not productively employed. Let me take just three examples. In 1997, the Arts Council employed 200 people and its overhead was 5 per cent. of its budget. It now employs 765 people, and its overhead is 11 per cent. of its budget. Giving away other people's money has always seemed to me to be one of the easiest things to be tasked with in life, let alone public life. Why the Arts Council needs four times as many people to do the job as it did in 1997 beggars belief.
	In the national health service, most of the increase in numbers has been in health professionals. Of 290,000 employees, 172,000 have been health professionals, but 120,000-40 per cent.-have been management and support staff. The Office for National Statistics has just reported that productivity is falling in the NHS. That is not surprising, because one cannot throw at it the amounts of money that the Government have and get value for money from it. The NHS can make massive efficiency and productivity savings over the next few years on the basis of the very generous settlements that the Government have given it. As for schools, there have been 41,000 more teachers but 90,000 more support staff. There is a huge increase in bureaucracy from which we can make savings. These people will move into the private sector as it starts to recover when the Government get out of the mess that they are in.
	That will require a little bit of boosting on the supply side. I should like to make a couple of suggestions about how the unemployment that will inevitably be created gets picked up in the private sector more quickly than it might otherwise be. If I were Chancellor, I would have, for two years, 100 per cent. capital allowances and zero capital gains tax on business investment made during that period to try to bring forward business investment that will create jobs. That would mean a very significant tax incentive. The Government have gone a little way towards it, because they have reduced capital gains tax rates a lot over the past few years, but a temporary measure like that would do what is needed.
	My other plea is that when public spending is cut, as it inevitably will be, we try to protect a couple of areas of the capital budget. The Government make two contributions to the productivity of the nation: in transport and in education. Although there has been a lot of investment in some aspects of transport, the investment in roads has been appalling under this Government. Many business men say that what they would like is not all the Government's programmes but a better road to the docks from wherever their factory happens to be. On higher and further education, raising the skills of people in the work force makes them more employable and more productive, and I would like that aspect to be protected. Other areas of capital spending will inevitably come under pressure, but they are always the easiest things to cut.
	The banks have been one of the causes of the problems we have been experiencing, but, remarkably, they seem to fail completely to appreciate how unpopular they are, the problems they have caused or the need for any adjustment in how they are regulated and how they behave. They have gone back, remarkably quickly, to what seem to me to be their bad old ways. It is absolutely right for the Government, as the guarantor of retail deposits and the lender of last resort in terms of system risk, to say, "We're never going to have this happen again." I think Members in all parts of the House are agreed about that. We have heard all sorts of ideas. Adair Turner has talked about micro-regulation by the Financial Services Authority. David Walker has talked about the reform of bank boards and moving regulation into the Bank of England, which is probably a good idea. We have heard about counter-cyclical capital ratios, micro-prudential regulation, and watching liquidity. I am sure that all those ideas have something to contribute. However, if the new regulatory framework is to work, it will have to involve some international co-ordination; otherwise, people will just go into regulatory arbitrage, as they did before.
	I would like to suggest something much more simple. The net assets and liabilities of the banking sector mirror the net assets and liabilities of the non-financial part of the economy. If bank balance sheets are growing at 10 per cent. a year but the economy is clearly not growing that fast, that tells us that there is a problem. That is mirrored, in turn, by the money supply. Throughout most of the previous decade, the economy was growing at about 3 per cent. a year and the money supply was growing at 10 per cent. That was a big red flag showing that there was a problem. One would not need to be a super-clever regulator to realise that banks were expanding their lending too fast and probably lending a lot of money to people who could not pay it back.
	Ultimately, in all such banking crises, there is one problem-the banks made bad loans, and they will not get that money back. In this case, they got it so badly wrong that the taxpayer had to step in to help them out. The industry is too big-it is worth four and a half times our gross domestic product. By that I mean that the banks' balance sheets are too big, not that the financial services industry is too big. We must remember that for every fat cat banker with a £10 million bonus, there are probably 50,000 people working in fairly ordinary jobs in call centres or offices, processing transactions, in sales and marketing, or whatever. A very large number of people are employed in an industry that is a very important one for us internationally.
	I should like to make a couple of suggestions of my own. The Americans have suggested bringing back the Glass-Steagall division between investment banking and commercial banking-the casino and the utility. I find that a pretty attractive idea, although I worry, on the other side, that big companies need banks that can do a lot of things for them. If we are not to go the whole hog, I do not see why we cannot put banks into silos. The bank could run its mergers and acquisitions and corporate finance business in one silo, with a certain amount of capital committed to it but not putting deposits at risk. If it wanted to run a proprietary trading operation-frankly, I do not believe it should, because it would basically be betting against its customers-that should be in a separate silo. The only thing that the Government should guarantee is the retail deposits in a separate subsidiary of the banking group, and we should regulate very tightly what it did with that money. If a bank wanted to run its own internal hedge fund and lost money on that, it would lose a certain amount of capital, but it would not put the rest of the business at risk, as Lehman Brothers did.
	We have to stop people gambling. In insurance, one cannot have a reinsurance contract without having an insurance contract in the first place-one cannot insure something in which one does not have an interest. It ought to be the same with credit default swaps and associated derivatives. There are trillions of them floating on a tiny amount of real transactions, and they ought to be restricted to the amount of the real transactions.
	The big point that I wish to make is that the ethics and morality of the banking business need to change. When the closed shop of English gentlemen who ran the City for a couple of hundred years was broken up 30 years ago, we got an eat-what-you-kill philosophy from the Americans instead. It is pernicious, because it encourages an individual to take a very short-term view of what he or she does, in the interests of maximising his or her own bonus. Nobody is looking after the firm or much concerned about the customer. Bankers need to start thinking about the purpose of what they do, and they need to reintroduce strong ethics to it. They need to deal with conflicts of interest over proprietary trading, and they must put the good of the customer and the organisation that they work for much higher up their agenda.
	I believe that the idea of a transaction tax on banks is terrible, as it would just get passed on to customers. However, the idea of taxing the banks' profits a bit more might be good. The reason why they are making so much money at the moment is that they can borrow it from the Bank of England for next to nothing. The argument for a windfall tax on the banks is pretty overwhelming, and if my party is in charge of these affairs in a couple of months' time, as I hope it will be, I hope that it will take that on board.
	I came into this place when a Conservative Government were trying to sort out the terrible fiscal and monetary mess that a Labour Government had led us into, and I fear that I am leaving when the same thing is about to happen. In between, there was a period of pretty sound finance both under our party and under the current Government for their first five, six or seven years. I fundamentally and fervently believe that it is the job of the Government to run their finances soundly; otherwise, they are mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren, which is at worst immoral and at best not very intelligent.

Charles Kennedy: Unlike the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson), who has just concluded his contribution in characteristically robust and witty fashion, I will not follow the general trend of the debate by describing my speech as a valedictory address-I hope that it is not, as one who seeks re-election. Indeed, if God spares me for another 10 days or so, I can at least confidently state that this will not be my last contribution of the Parliament, because, for the first time in nearly 27 years, I have got Question 1 in Scotland Question Time immediately after the Easter recess.
	Reflecting on the many and varied valedictory addresses to which the Chamber has been privileged to listen this evening, it has struck me that one's maiden speech is heard with indulgence and some affection and good will, that one's valedictory speech is heard with gained and earned respect and also some affection, and it is just the bit in between that can be sheer hell on the Floor of the House. We should probably all bear that in mind; it is a good corrective.
	I want to contribute briefly, essentially from a constituency vantage point, and speak about one or two items in the Budget and their impact on my part of the country. In doing that, I recognise that the Budget is constrained through the financial circumstances and that its measures are liable to be frustrated because of parliamentary constraints. We all know that we will look for the real Budget-the real measures-in the comprehensive spending review and the voting decisions that are made in the next Parliament, whatever its arithmetic. The Budget has therefore been presented in that shade and is subject to recessionary and banking pressures that have been generated globally, particularly in the past 12 to 18 months.
	Bashing the bankers has become as popular as bashing Members of Parliament-I say that on the day of a significant statement about the new expenses regime that will kick in for the next House of Commons. I believe that, even without the banking implosion, when this or any other country-but certainly our country, which remains an island economy, however much we are enmeshed in a welcome way in the single European market-hits tough times economically, although of course we need our banks and we need them to behave responsibly and properly, as they should have done, we essentially need to build our way out of recession. That means a viable and vibrant manufacturing base and an emphasis on construction, which can do so much to help kick-start or pick up the momentum of the economy in different parts of the country. That applies especially to a traditionally fragile economic area such as mine, which is on the periphery of the market and of the UK, as well as of the European Union, and is always destined to be-the highlands and islands of Scotland.
	One need only consider current unemployment and what sector those who are unemployed were in when they last had a job to realise that the proportion in construction or construction-related activity was enormous. Of course, as the Secretary of State rightly said when he opened the debate, the spin-off benefits of new build in the housing sector and the knock-on effects are significant. I therefore hope that the changes in the Budget, for example, on stamp duty, will help the Scottish economy as much as the English economy, perhaps particularly that of the south-east of England, and give a lift to a more buoyant housing market, which will assist the movement of money and people and help release an increase in the wealth passing hands across the economy for the construction of new housing generally.
	That will go a long way to help to lift unemployment in so many parts of the country, as will the more modest but much needed construction-related activity that has arisen not least because of the atrocious winter weather that we have suffered. I represent the second northernmost constituency on the mainland, and if I may say, those engaged in dealing with the severity of the snow that we faced this winter performed magnificently. That construction-related activity has arisen not only because of the recent weather, but there is a persistent problem because of underfunding, so I hope that the Scottish National party Government in Edinburgh will be constructive and responsible in their approach to the extra funding from the UK Exchequer. I hope that they will not-as is so often their wont-turn it into a political football between them and the Labour Government in London as to who can match whom for funding. The fact is that the road user and the individual citizen in Scotland, including in the highlands, is less concerned about who gives the stamp of approval for investment than about that investment getting through, so that there is a much needed improvement in infrastructure.
	My second point-I am speaking wearing my informal hat as rector of the university of Glasgow, and I am perhaps not required to declare that as an interest-is on the welcome increase in spending on higher education. Last year, Lord Mandelson made announcements about sudden, dramatic and unanticipated cuts, but he is in danger of ditching centuries upon centuries of British history with regard to the university sector. I did a TV programme with him on Budget day last week, when he simply lectured the universities on how they must cut their cloth accordingly, find savings, do what they were told and the rest of it. Even Mrs. Thatcher did not talk about the universities in quite that way. They may frequently have irritated her, but she accepted that under the workings of our unwritten constitution, at the end of the day, they are supposed to be independent institutions, despite the fact that they rightly receive public subvention. Lord Mandelson does not appear to feel constrained even to the extent that Mrs. Thatcher did in her most modest moments.
	Real-terms cuts have been announced for the Scottish universities. On the back of last week's Budget, the Scottish Funding Council announced that 20 Scottish institutions will receive a 1.2 per cent. increase in funding for 2009-10, but, as the National Union of Students Scotland and the University and College Union say, that represents a real-terms cut overall, which does not match what the SFC said on 18 March, which was that there has already been a cut of £573 million from this year's budget. Just as we need to invest in infrastructure, we need to invest in the future. There is a common consensus across the political spectrum that education, skilled training, innovation, science and research are going to be crucial for our country in the long term. The Government are therefore pursuing a false economy in the tertiary sector.
	An innovative approach to the economy is demonstrated by the interesting proposals for the green bank, which are worthy of support. That could help further to kick-start our exploration of alternative strategies for economic renewal and maintenance of the economy generally, and it pushes the boat out further, not least in the energy sector. Scotland, including the highlands and islands, has so much to offer on renewables. I hope that the beginnings represented by the green bank will help to place my part of the country even more at the forefront of cutting-edge technologies for further generations.
	Something else that helps to correct the inevitable geographic imbalance of my constituency-I referred to that earlier-is the arrival of broadband. The steps that the Government are taking to extend the scope and coverage of broadband are welcome, and the Prime Minister recently said that there will be 90-plus per cent. coverage, but lo and behold, my part of the country is one of the areas that will not be covered soon. That is despite the fact that it is one of the areas of the country most in need of the opportunity that broadband and super broadband provides to help to alleviate the in-built difficulties that we face in access to markets and consumers, and to give us the ability to compete on a level playing field.
	Another feature of this Budget and so many before it-Labour and Conservative-is that the playing field is grossly distorted by the way in which fuel duty is applied in this country. Although the Chancellor is phasing the increase in three instalments from this year to the next, there is still-after years of reports, investigations and pleas from across the political spectrum -no recognition of the pressing difficulties caused by fuel duty in rural areas, where public transport is all too often not available, and where the motor vehicle is not a luxury item, but an absolutely social and economic necessity. In that way, I am afraid to say, the Budget falls well short.
	The Budget will be a key issue in the coming weeks in our part of the country. Some measures are welcome, but there is so much more to campaign for.

Laura Moffatt: It is an absolute pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) and, of course, it is not the first time that I have done so. I follow him in representing the fantastic constituency of Crawley, and I am sure that he will remember well the days when he did so. I was interested to hear him talk about the harm that the Government have apparently done to business. I remember that, when he represented Crawley during the recession of the early 1990s, companies were falling like ninepins and people were losing their jobs and homes day after day. They found that their homes were not worth half what they had been worth when they bought them. Nothing was done to help those people; no assistance was offered by the Government.
	I support this measured, quiet Budget. It is taking us on a journey, with its support for business and families. It did not make huge promises that could not be met, but it understands that our communities need support. We are debating infrastructure and growth today, and they are at the heart of my constituency, whose many companies are demonstrating innovation and entrepreneurship and offering employment. It is important for those companies to know that the Government understand their needs.
	It was interesting to hear the hon. Gentleman talk about red tape in the workplace. Many of the people I talk to feel that that red tape is about being safe at work, about having decent employment or about people having their disability recognised in the workplace so that they can give of their best. This is the argument about intervention versus leaving everything to market forces, and it is obvious from the debate that there are different views on that across the House. Most Labour Members believe that intervention is right, and that it was right, for example, to support the banks-although not the bankers. The right hon. and learned Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) was absolutely right in his assessment of those who led us into this appalling problem and who have no understanding of what they have done.
	Securing the economic well-being of our communities is achieved not only by the Budget but, day in and day out, by those who are keen to see their companies grow and keen to employ people properly. Those people understand how good companies can operate in our communities. That is why I was pleased to see the proposals for the development of the green investment bank. A company in my constituency, Ceres Power, is developing a fuel cell that will reduce our reliance on carbon energy by 50 per cent. It is important to support such companies and to help them to get investment, and it would have been helpful for that company to have had the green investment bank to turn to, because its only stated aim was to produce a product that would reduce our reliance on carbon and make the planet a better place. That was therefore an excellent Budget proposal, and I hope to see the project expand and grow.
	As we are focusing on investment and infrastructure, it is important to say how good it was to see the investment in the Thameslink programme reinforced. That will involve more than £5 billion of investment to improve the line between Brighton and Bedford, and all the stations in between. That is a crucial route, in that it brings work and investment to the area. It allows people to live and work in an already overcrowded area by providing a decent means of travel and reducing their reliance on road vehicles.
	Those of us who serve on the all-party group on Thameslink were upset to see that the decision to appoint a preferred bidder for the rolling stock had been delayed. Speaking as one of the signatories to the early-day motion calling for that decision to be announced before the Easter recess, I hope that we will hear about that soon, although I accept that we are cutting it fine. That would demonstrate a real commitment and let us know that the programme, which is so important to us, was safe. If we are to attract business, it is vital to invest in our major infrastructure centres such as Gatwick airport. The redevelopment of the train station there is crucial to our businesses.
	That brings me to the reasons why I fully support the regional development agencies, especially the South East England Development Agency, which has done an enormous amount of good in attracting business to, and keeping business in, the south-east. There is often a tremendous pull to go elsewhere, and a business that is prospering can sometimes need help to remain in the area. SEEDA has been at the forefront of providing much of that support. I do not trust or support the notion that local authorities, alone or in partnership, will be able to do that work. I foresee all sorts of difficulties if a particular local authority were to take a leading role, to the disadvantage of others. The good thing about having a regional development agency that can take a step away from the political forum is that it can think about investment in a much more strategic way, and I hope that that will continue.
	Supporting our businesses by giving them time to pay their tax has been hugely welcomed, in my constituency and elsewhere. Through my role as assistant Minister for the South East, I have discovered that other businesses throughout the region have found that support extremely helpful. Small interventions can give confidence to businesses and companies, which can make all the difference to their business decisions. We should not underestimate how much such initiatives have helped.
	The use of programmes such as the mortgage rescue scheme might not always entail the buying of a home, but early intervention by the local authority is crucial. Crawley borough council, for example, has demonstrated that the system has been very helpful. It has not had to hand over vast sums of money to assist people, but it has intervened with good, early advice to mortgage owners to prevent repossession. We cannot underestimate the importance of that. We have all sorts of methods for promoting help and support in our communities.
	I have listened to the argument that we have no right to sell our future, as it is only on loan to us from our children. I believe, however, that every child whose parent did not lose their job because their company was given time to pay its taxes represents an investment worth making; every child whose parents did not lose their home, thanks to the intervention of this Government, represents an intervention worth applauding; and every young person who was taken on by a company through the future jobs fund and given an opportunity in the workplace will be thanking this Government for ensuring that they have a future.
	Of course, such intervention requires money. In this fragile economy, when we are gently coming out of recession and back into growth, and when companies are feeling just enough confidence to acquire new equipment and take on new staff, we have no right to put any of that at risk. We in this House have no right to throw caution to the wind in order to pay back debt, and to throw those people into turmoil once again. I hope that, when my right hon. and hon. Friends are back in their places on the Front Bench after the general election, they will understand that this investment needs to continue. The confidence and sense of security that the business community needs in order to do its job are greatly valued. I did not get lots of surveys back saying that people were fed up with red tape. The people in our communities are begging for more help and support. They are not saying that they do not want that to continue; they are asking for more to be done for them.
	After the general election, when I have left the House, I am going to be testing-I hope so, if any trust will have me-whether investment in the NHS has been as valuable as I always hoped it was over the last 13 years, providing us with a health service of which we can at last be immensely proud and one that we can be sure is becoming a world-class system. I have decided to get back my registration from my nursing career and I intend to test that system to ensure that all that the Government and Labour Members have done and fought for in the NHS has been worth while. For me, supporting our health service in a way that makes me feel proud and delighted to rejoin it will be the true reward of having been in this House for 13 years.

David Simpson: It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Crawley (Laura Moffatt). May I take this opportunity to wish her well when she leaves the House?
	The last Budget statement in the life of this Parliament has been made and we have had the usual post-match analysis from politicians, pundits and experts. The general opinion seems to be that the Chancellor was playing for a draw and that the real match will be held after May, although it may be under new management-only time will tell.
	With that in mind, and given the fact that we are now heading for a general election, I was not entirely surprised by the Chancellor's statement, although in fairness to him, he seemed to resist the temptation to indulge in pre-election giveaways-not that there was, perhaps, much left to give away. Also in fairness to him, he has inherited a legacy that few of us would envy. Ruth Sutherland, writing in  The Observer, said that the Chancellor's predecessor
	"presided over an increasingly unbalanced and indebted economy in which the City grew over-mighty and our industrial base shrank alarmingly".
	It is little wonder that the Budget was high in rhetoric and low in substance.
	Despite the Chancellor's efforts, I find myself surprisingly in agreement with the leader of the Liberal Democrats when he said that the Budget was more of an obituary than a manifesto. Indeed, the opening sentences of the Chancellor's statement set the tone of vagueness and ambiguity that permeates most of his Budget. Although I understand the reasons for this, I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson), who is also Minister of Finance and Personnel in the Northern Ireland Executive, when he expressed concern about the lack of detail on future spending plans and how the Chancellor intends to reduce the level of public sector borrowing in the coming years.
	The Chancellor tells us that we are emerging from recession, and perhaps there are signs of that, but there is a wide variety of views on that-often, it has to be said, from those who did not foresee the recession in the first place. Even if we are emerging from the recession, however, we are among the last of the developed countries to do so.
	The Chancellor says that borrowing is lower than forecast, but it is still worryingly high. We have heard many figures quoted in the debate. The deficit this year is 11.8 per cent. of gross domestic product; the Government have committed themselves to reducing it by half within four years, but that is based on growth figures that are open to challenge. Even if the deficit is halved by 2014-and it is a big if-the CBI and others have said that it will be too little, too late. Cutting the deficit appears to rely on spending cuts that remain vague and on extremely optimistic projections for the economy. The frightening level of the national debt must be tackled. Whoever occupies No. 10 and No. 11 after May will have some hard decisions to make.
	One of the Chancellor's ideas on how to reduce borrowing is the encouragement of economic growth. He has rightly stressed that this is the key to genuine recovery. He has repeated the Government's commitment to find new ways to enable small businesses to grow, to invest in and improve our national infrastructure and to promote research, innovation and enterprise. Those are good aims.
	We should all do what we can to encourage the private sector and to reduce the public sector. We can help local British companies by reducing unnecessary red tape, as we heard earlier, and bureaucratic procurement procedures. I welcome the Chancellor's commitment to developing traditional and new infrastructure. We can help by bringing forward some capital projects for schools, hospitals and roads. That is what we have done to good effect in Northern Ireland.
	I was encouraged by the fact that an extra £15 billion of Government contracts will go to SMEs. I was also encouraged by an announcement that entrepreneurs' relief from capital gains tax will be doubled to £2 million and taxed at 10 per cent. This will be welcomed by small businesses. I was further encouraged that the investment allowance for small firms will be doubled to £100,000. If British businesses are to compete, we must be at the cutting edge in energy supplies and digital communications, for example.
	I fully agree with the Chancellor's statement that access to finance is vital for small businesses. I am encouraged that the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds will provide a total of £94 million of new business loans, nearly 50 per cent. of which will go to smaller firms.

Richard Spring: I have read that the origin of the word "swansong" is the myth of the mute swan which, as it approached death, expressed itself with an extraordinary outpouring of noise in a very evocative way. I can only hope, for the sake of those who are left in the Chamber this evening, that comparisons between that and my speech will be somewhat limited.
	At some stage in their lives, all Members will have been asked why they entered politics. It is worth recalling what was happening in this country in the 1970s, when I started working. We were beset by terrible strikes, national bankruptcy and a massive brain drain, and I decided that I never wanted to see anything like that again. Sadly, however, as we heard in the Budget statement only last week, our economic situation is dire yet again. Strikes have returned, and our international reputation has been hugely diminished. The echo from an earlier time is there for all to hear.
	It is true that in the current economic crisis-although too many may have given up-unemployment has not, on the face of it, risen as fast as might have been expected, although of course it remains too high. That is largely due to the flexible arrangements introduced by past Conservative Governments. Nevertheless, 54,000 people still leave the labour market each quarter. Far too often, the reason is that they have simply become discouraged. They have given up on the belief that they will ever find jobs, and have joined the legions who are already receiving the various worklessness benefits dispensed by the Government. Who can blame them, given that over the three months to January the ranks of those who had already been out of work for more than a full year had risen by more than 60,000, to 687,000?
	It is truly incredible that, on top of all that, the Government are proposing yet another tax on jobs. The proposal to force employers and employees-including those on below-average incomes-to pay even more in national insurance contributions is a real economic and social misjudgment. We clearly have a jobs crisis on our hands, and the introduction of extra barriers to the creation of jobs makes no sense whatsoever. According to a report issued last week by Policy Exchange, the Treasury's own economic model suggests that a 2 per cent. rise in national insurance contributions could reduce GDP by a full 2 per cent. over three years. There is no point talking about job creation and then directly hitting the very businesses that could provide those jobs. That is simply crazy, and I therefore welcome the announcement made by my party this morning.
	The statistics on start-ups and business failures reveal part of the reason why our trade balance is so bad despite our massive currency depreciation, and why manufacturing has shrunk so dramatically in Britain. Nothing in the Budget really addressed that, and, inevitably, the business community has universally reacted negatively to the Budget overall.
	We have been in a recession on a "first in, last out" basis, according to any international comparison. Why has that happened, given that our fiscal stimulus has been smaller than those delivered in the American, French and German economies? Given that our actual budget deficit is so much larger than those of others, given that it costs so much more to insure our national debt, and given that people talk seriously about the threat to the sovereign credit rating of the United Kingdom, why would we not have been able to aid our economy as much as others even if we had chosen to do so? The reason is the Government's irresponsible spending at a time of strong worldwide growth.
	Why was the British economy driven into such a weak state that it was impossible for the Government to take measures that might have helped it? The Bank of England has printed as much money as it dared. With Government spending rising to 53 per cent. of GDP and £200 billion from quantitative easing flowing into our economy, we have two new and unwelcome national records to add to a growing list, both of which reflect the rapidity with which we have descended into the present financial maelstrom. Can anyone imagine circumstances in which, in each of the next two financial years, the Chancellor will be borrowing more money than the entire income tax take, and all that borrowing will be based on highly optimistic growth assumptions and the assumption that the markets will continue to allow us to borrow at historically high levels?
	All that was not enough to prevent the United Kingdom from suffering not only the worst recession in the G20, but the worst in living memory. The question that we must ask ourselves is "Why?" The true answer goes back to the year 2002, the year in which the then Chancellor of the Exchequer abandoned the prudent approach of the Administration who had preceded him and let rip. In the years that followed, the budget deficit did not fall below £30 billion annually. In the next five years, right in the middle of what the Governor of the Bank of England was calling the non-inflationary constant expansion or NICE decade, the Government borrowed £176 billion.
	The total irresponsibility of consistently leaving a gaping hole in the finances of the country broadly equal to the cost of the entire police and criminal justice system, in one of the most benign economic environments of all time, is the source of our present-day anguish. But then the Chancellor of the Exchequer had abolished the economic cycle, or so he absurdly said. The interest on the stock of debt that has built up is now £42 billion, £2 billion more than the entire defence budget, at a time when we are at war. The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculates that by 2014-15 debt interest payments will climb to £73.8 billion, equal to our defence and transport budgets. The proportion of debt interest payments on total tax revenues will be 10.6 per cent. at that stage.
	Under the present Government, we have seen a growth in the divide between different parts of the United Kingdom. Because of a number of funding formula changes, my constituency has experienced a string of NHS budgetary crises. The simple truth is that NHS spend in the Prime Minister's constituency is materially higher than that in my constituency. There is no rational explanation for that, and it certainly has precious little to do with health outcomes. My constituents have a real sense that the spending differentials relating to public services have little to do with need, but plenty to do with the political colour of the area in question. Rural England has become the poor relation of this urban-obsessed Government.
	The Government's overspending has resulted in a high cost to the British economy. We have fallen from 11th to 23rd in the league of corporation tax competitiveness. We have slipped from fourth to 84th in the World Economic Forum's global competitiveness report's rankings for the extent of tax burdens and evasion, and from fourth to 86th in its ranking for regulatory flexibility and efficiency of social programmes. That is part of the reason 1,440 private-sector workers lost their jobs each and every day last year, while the number of state employees rose by 126 day in, day out.
	The problem goes back to 1998, when the Government introduced the comprehensive spending review. It had been promised by the Prime Minister, but he has since abandoned it. We must ask ourselves why he was willing to continue the practice before the two previous elections but is unwilling to do so on this occasion, as a result of which specific spending impacts remain a mystery. In fact, the Government are so scared of spelling out to the nation the extent of the crisis-so terrified of admitting the true costs of a crisis of their creation-that they are determined to forgo a spending review, and we have had no honesty on the subject.
	One of the by-products of the collapse of our reputation abroad is how financial services regulation proposals have arisen in Brussels. For all its imperfections, the City of London is still the jewel in the crown of Europe, in that the range and depth of its financial expertise-and all the ancillary services-are unmatched anywhere else, yet, through neglect and sheer incompetence, this Government have had to witness the growth of EU financial services regulatory proposals that are clearly not in our interest. It is clear that one of the main reasons for that is the catastrophic failure of our tripartite regulatory system.
	When the financial crisis broke, the system that was in place was like an animal immobilised in fear by oncoming headlights. I have heard many times from those from other EU countries that Britain simply has no credibility or authority to determine European regulatory architecture because our own has been such a failure, and yet, incredibly, the Government have no plans to reform it. That matches their unwillingness to reform our public sector, where there is both a decline in productivity and a total unwillingness to reform the system.
	Especially when reflecting on this Budget and the events that have led up to it, I leave the House on a bittersweet note. Despite the hugely negative view of Parliament and parliamentary colleagues, I for one-I know this sentiment is widely shared-regard it as a huge privilege to have been a Member of the House of Commons and to have represented my constituents in this place. Yet just as I commenced my working life at a time of economic collapse, sadly, I leave this place now with history repeating itself. However, just as before it took a Conservative Government to pull this country back from the abyss, I confidently predict that that will be the case again, some 30 years on.

Phil Willis: It is interesting that I am following the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Mr. Spring) because, unlike him, I do not have a rosy picture of what I inherited when I first entered this House in 1997. I had worked as a head teacher for some 20 years, mostly under a Conservative Government, and every single year there was a cut in my budget-a cut in staffing and in the resources being spent on young people. Therefore, although I agree with many of the hon. Gentleman's comments, I certainly do not believe we should be taking lectures from somebody whose party almost brought the country to its knees before '97.
	It is a pleasure to be speaking for the last time in the House of Commons. It is a pleasure to do so not because I am leaving but because, despite all the difficulties, the last 13 years have been an absolute pleasure for me, as someone who came to the House as a 55-year-old-and who had the satisfaction of defeating Norman Lamont at the '97 election. I leave having retained the support of the people of Harrogate and Knaresborough for the last three general elections. That support has been remarkable.
	It is interesting, too, that I should be leaving Parliament with my constituency having had very little support from this Government or, indeed, previous Governments. It is a place with a huge amount of residual self-support within it, and it is an entrepreneurial community that has bucked many trends, including the current recession, and long may it continue to do so.
	My greatest pleasure in my time in this House has come from chairing the Select Committee on Science and Technology for the past five years, and I want to focus on the future of UK science and engineering. Before doing so, however, I want to pay tribute to the other members of my Committee who are standing down at the election and who have served the House extraordinarily well during their time here: the hon. Members for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon), for Bristol, North-West (Dr. Naysmith), for Daventry (Mr. Boswell) and for Eccles (Ian Stewart). I should also, of course, pay tribute to Dr. Ian Gibson who, sadly, stood down before the end of the Parliament.
	I was in the Chamber for today's opening speeches, and I listened to the hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) praising the fact that an incoming Conservative Government would reduce national insurance contributions, paying for that with efficiency savings. I found that interesting because I picked up the following quote from 19 May 2008:
	"The Government 'efficiency drive' is one of the oldest tricks in the book. The trouble is, it's nearly always just that - a trick. In fact it's such a cliché, there was an episode of Yes Minister about it".
	That was written by the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), yet now, of course, that is his party's policy.
	It was interesting that the Chancellor said very little about science in his Budget speech. I welcome the Government's announcement of a green investment bank, as, I think, does the whole House. I also welcome the creation of technology and innovation centres, and the £25 million of investment they will bring, although it is rather curious that it is felt we need them when we have the Technology Strategy Board, which has been doing extraordinarily good work since it was set up.
	The Chancellor stated that he wants to promote research, innovation and enterprise, yet it appears that the research part of that has been rather overlooked in favour of innovation and enterprise. It is all well and good to concentrate on translating our excellent research into commercial activity, but unless we have investment in the basic research itself we will not have the raw material to develop the economy in the long term. We must guard against the nonsensical idea that fundamental and applied research are somehow different silos. They are not; they are part of the same continuum, and if we do not invest in both of them, we will lose out.
	Despite frequent references to innovation in the Budget, there was no reference to the science and innovation investment framework which, since 2004, has been one of the Government's most powerful measures in giving a long-term structure to science and innovation. Nor was there any reference to the Government's target of achieving expenditure on research of 2.5 per cent. of GDP. That seems to have been lost.
	In reality, therefore, despite being committed to science and innovation driving the post-recession economy, the Chancellor mentioned that only once, and, tellingly, he spoke about science in the past tense. It was not about the future: the Chancellor told the House that the Government had increased investment in British science by some 88 per cent. in real terms over the past 10 years. That is true, and they should be congratulated: this Government's commitment to science has surpassed that of any previous Government in my lifetime. However, the reality is that that is now in the past tense.
	This Budget should have been about the future, but sadly it was not. In respect of science and engineering, it appears that the job is done. The Government appear to accept that, at best, we have peaked in our efforts and that success is now to limit cuts rather than to make a case for future investment. Frankly, that is at odds with what the Government have been saying over previous years. In February last year, the Chancellor said in his Oxford Romanes lecture that
	"the bottom line is that the downturn is no time to slow down our investment in science".
	Yet that is exactly what we now seem to be doing. There is to be £600 million of cuts in science, research and higher education precisely at the time we need to be investing more. Lord Mandelson said last week that we have drawn a line in the sand in respect of protecting our science spend. Sadly, if the height of this nation's ambition is simply to draw a line and say that we are not going to increase spending in future, we will slip behind.
	We should take a look at what our overseas competitors are doing in terms of investment. President Obama said:
	"Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment, and our quality of life than it has ever been before."
	That was not just rhetoric, because he backed it up by pledging $21 billion of investment-the largest commitment to scientific research ever seen in the States-with 5.7 per cent. of the US federal research and development budget to be spent on science by 2011. In Australia, science spending has increased by 25 per cent. In the same week as the UK's pre-Budget report announced a £6 million cut, the French Government announced a fresh €35 billion investment in the knowledge economy and in the green economy, some €11 billion of which is to be allocated to the top French universities. Countries such as Singapore, China and India are all investing huge sums, but what did we do? The Prime Minister announced a £15 billion economic stimulus package, but £12.5 billion of it went on a 2.5 per cent. VAT cut for people to spend in the shops purely on retail. That was not an investment in the nation-one can imagine what that £12.5 billion could have done if it had been invested in our science base.
	In reality, what science is delivering for this country is beyond reproach. The Royal Society produced its major report last week and it was tremendous reading. It mentioned that over the past five years university spin-outs employed 14,000 people and had a turnover of £1.1 billion and that over the past decade university bioscience departments have generated more than 200 companies. Despite what the report says, without considerable investment in our science base the UK will face decades of slow economic decline. The report that my Committee published a week or so ago on the impact of cuts on the science budget concluded that a failure to increase investment in science is inconsistent with the Government's policy ambition of growth in the sector and undermines their previous good record.
	The UK risks losing its brightest academics to countries with demonstrable guaranteed investment for the future, and we cannot allow that to happen. The Council for Science and Technology-the Prime Minister's own think tank-said:
	"The first step is for Government to continue to prioritise research funding against other competing financial pressures".
	Tonight, we have heard about lots of things being protected. The right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) was right to say that we cannot simply protect things for the sake of protecting them and that there must be a real long-term mission-science clearly can deliver that.
	Science is not a stop-go activity: Honda and Ford can suddenly say that they will close their labs for three months because the money is not coming in, but science is not like that. We know that if we close our labs and stop investing, our brightest and best scientists will go elsewhere. Interestingly, the Royal Society's report said that it was people who actually make the difference. These scientists are the people we need to invest in, but sadly it appears that that will not happen.
	The real opportunity, in response to this Budget, was for Her Majesty's Opposition to say what they would have done about science, but we did not hear a word from them. The hon. Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie), who represents the Tories on science, said that there would be no extra investment until the current credit crisis was over and we had solved the current recession problems-that is 10 years down the line. If we wait 10 years for that sort of action, our science base will be lost. The Government have had a terrific record so far on investing in science and it is very sad that when the country needs them most they have suddenly lost heart and failed to make that investment. Perhaps they will have a rethink if the Government are returned to office after the general election, but if anyone takes their place, I hope that they will put science at the heart of what they do.

Andrew Turner: This Budget bears little relation to the times in which we live and comes from a Government who have run out of time altogether. After the deepest recession in generations, Governments, financial institutions and credit rating agencies around the world are reaching a new consensus that urgent action must be taken to reduce budget deficits. Only recently, the European Commission called for more information on how the Government would go about halving the deficit from 2011. Markets are crying out for the detail of how this will be achieved, and the British people are demanding to know that their children's futures will not be sacrificed under the burden of this Government's debt. Yet the Budget is utterly lacking in the action needed to reduce the deficit. The Chancellor was content simply to make projections, when he should have been detailing plans, and to talk vaguely about an end point instead of precisely focusing on how we will get there.
	As such, this is a Budget of half measures, damaging delays and illusionary targets. Most worryingly, no effort was made to bridge the credibility gap. The director of the Institute of Directors noted:
	"The chancellor's GDP forecasts are too optimistic and there is still no sign of a credible deficit reduction plan".
	He went on to say that
	"we need to hear a lot more from the government on debt reduction."
	Roger Bootle, economic adviser to Deloitte, said:
	"The Government has still put to put the flesh on the bones of its plans to cut spending".
	Although the Chancellor has revised his figures, borrowing still stands at more than 10 times its 1997 level. I recognise that unprecedented action has been taken in the form of the fiscal stimulus, but the Government have ignored the unprecedented consequences in the form of drastically higher debt. Indeed, Britain's national debt will hit an unprecedented £1.3 trillion by 2014-15, which is more than double the level of just a year ago and amounts to more than £50,000 per household. If we do not quickly get a handle on this, our triple A credit rating will be downgraded, investors will lose confidence and the recovery will stall, if not worse. This situation will not just sort itself out, it will not just evaporate and it cannot be left for future Governments or future generations to sort out; it is our moral duty to begin reducing the deficit now, and that requires action from the Government today.
	In the absence of a plan, the main positive in the Budget is that things are not quite as bad as expected: our borrowing is £167 billion, rather than £178 billion; the interest on the debt is slightly lower than expected; and the structural debt is predicted to be 75 per cent. of GDP by 2013-14, rather than 78 per cent. But saying that the situation is "not quite as bad" is not the same as detailing how it will get better. One cannot give a Budget, let alone run an economy, on happenstance and fortunate recalculations alone.
	Like the portrait of Dorian Gray, what beauty there is to this Budget is only skin deep. When we look below the surface, we see that the Chancellor utterly ducked making the tough decisions in the best interest of the country and instead chose to penalise the overwhelming majority of hard-working people. There is nothing stealthy about that. Although the Chancellor may coat it in the best intentions, it is plain that he chose tax hikes over public sector cuts. He made the wrong choice again on small businesses. When he should have cut the main rate of corporation tax, he instead chose to extend targeted tax relief for some businesses. That does very little to offset the £4.5 billion cost of the one penny rise in national insurance, which will be detrimental to all businesses. In the absence of any decisions on the deficit, the Chancellor took the wrong decisions on taxation.
	Cutting the deficit and getting the economy growing are one of today's defining issues. No doubt in the coming weeks all parties will be publishing their plans on how to reduce the deficit while promoting growth, but the Budget was the Government's unique opportunity to reassure the markets, secure the recovery and, most importantly, to help the British people. They have comprehensively failed in every respect. Indeed, it is nonsensical to expect the same Government who caused the problem on the one hand to offer an effective solution on the other. So, we need an alternative. If we do not get a grip now on tackling the continued implications of the economic crisis, it will be superseded by a social crisis that will make the recession look like small change. We must also give people greater opportunity to invest their own money rather than restricting financial freedom through the higher taxes that the Government are so keen on imposing.

David Drew: I am delighted to take part in the Budget debate. Unlike a number of other hon. Members tonight, I hope that this will not be my valedictory speech, because I am standing at the election and intend to win. I intend to win on a slightly different programme from that on which other hon. Members are putting themselves forward.
	I am grateful that normal politics have returned and we are at least having a debate on aspects of the economy and economic growth that have perhaps been avoided for too long. My take on this, of course, is that the Budget falls against the background of a difficult and steep decline in our economic fortunes. The recession is here. Numerically, we might be just about climbing out the other side, but anyone who thinks that we are there and can put the flags out is, I think, completely optimistic and naive.
	I go around my local firms-people are always surprised when I say this, but Stroud is a centre of manufacturing and some 25 per cent. of our jobs are in that sector, which is much more than twice the national average and means that Stroud is as close to a valley town in the north-west as it is to the traditional south-west town, so I have some knowledge of manufacturing-and I would make three quick observations. First, the recovery is fragile and any attempt to jam on the brakes in terms of public spending has an impact on not only the public sector but the private sector. The two sectors are so inextricably linked that anything that effectively crunches the public sector will have a completely deleterious effect on the private sector. That matters, because the last thing that we want for those who work in both sectors is a rapid increase in unemployment. As we learned from the 1980s and 1990s, that is not a cost worth paying. More particularly, it leads to a cost that we have to pay through unemployment benefit and all the benefits that go with that. That is, I hope, a lesson that the Government have learned.
	Some of us take a position that it is wrong to cut, and it is certainly wrong to cut now and to cut some of the things that, sadly, the Front Benchers seem to be too intent on cutting in a race to the bottom. I have been struck by the words of Joseph Stiglitz and our own Danny Blanchflower-I tried to persuade my Government that he would be an excellent new representative of the Bank of England, because he has seen the recession both in terms of the causation and latterly in terms of what we need to do. I am aware that, as colleagues have mentioned, we have a budget deficit and that we have to do something about it, but some of the schemes end up cutting jobs in the public sector-the jobs of those who had no fault whatsoever in the financial collapse. Why should they be made to pay the consequences? Instead, we should be considering some of those vainglorious projects that Governments from my party and from other parties have too often seen as shibboleths but should be anything but. I offer Trident, ID cards, withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan as a starting point, if we are going to talk about budget deficit reduction.
	As much as I want to see some aspects of public spending reduced, I still think that we overdo and completely exaggerate the impact of the public debt situation. According to all the figures, Britain will remain in the middle of the Group of Seven if we carry through some of the changes that are being mooted. As I have said, I approach the matter from a completely different perspective. I think the most fascinating figures of all, which form a backcloth to all this, are those that show that until the 1970s, we spent roughly 5 per cent. per annum on gross domestic capital investment in the public sector, which went down to 0.9 per cent. in the '80s and '90s and which this Government have brought back up to 3.9 per cent. If we include the private finance initiatives-I have my disagreements with them-the figure is substantially higher than that. I am proud of that. We have rebuilt schools and health facilities, and we have put money into the social infrastructure of our country. Why should we destroy all that because of other people's faults?
	There is a way out of this recession. I make no apology for saying that I am an advocate of the green new deal. Let me make it very clear that that is not the Green party new deal, because many of the people who contributed to it are quite well-known Labour party people, as well as those of no party. Let me give in the time that I have left some of the ways in which I think we can grow sensibly, sustainably and even morally out of the problems that we made for ourselves. Of course, I am talking about investment in energy efficiency and microgeneration, the creation of thousands of green jobs, a windfall tax on the profits of the oil and gas companies, developing financial incentives for green investment and reducing energy use and changes to the UK's financial system, including a new way in which we calculate interest rates to advantage green investment in particular. We need to reconsider how we have treated financial institutions. I think that the Government are right to step in and help, if not to take over a number of the financial institutions, but I am exceedingly wary of having a Dutch auction in getting rid of them.
	Last but not least, there should be much more transparency in the way in which we demand financial reporting and a clamping down on tax havens. Of course, the one great cheer that came from the Government Benches when the Budget was announced was the announcement on what is now being called the "Belize gambit", whereby this Government, for the first time, have begun to get serious about tax evasion, tax avoidance, tax loopholes and tax havens. At face value, looking at the notion of tax information exchange agreements, we now have a sensible way forward. Sadly, there are problems with TIEAs. They are termed in a pretty amorphous way, and they are not easy to operate because it takes two to tango and although the British Government might be willing to disclose certain information, that does not necessarily mean that those with whom we might wish to tango will give us the information that we want.
	I hope that my right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury will say something about how we are going to raise billions of pounds from those who have made little or no contribution. It is about time that they made a proper contribution, but we need to clarify how TIEAs will function in practice. That will rely on issues to do with the identity of the person under investigation or examination; what information is sought; the tax purpose for which it is sought; the grounds for believing that the information requested is held within the jurisdiction of which a request is made; and-last but not least-to the extent known, the name and address of any person believed to be in possession of the requested information. So, it is a question of knowing who has the money and for what purpose, and then making sure that they are willing to disclose the true financial picture.
	We are not talking about going into foreign jurisdictions. We are talking about people who, it is claimed, are either domiciled or, to some extent, resident in this country, but who exploit tax havens far too readily and easily. There is a history of TIEAs not working terribly well, so I hope that my right hon. Friend will give me some good news about how we will operate a much more robust and rigorous attempt to drive down what many of us feel are the worst excesses of capitalism, whereby people do not pay anything like the right rate of tax in this country, even though they derive many benefits from this country. This is about fairness, justice and the reality of the world today.
	If my right hon. Friend wants any help, he will be pleased to know that I am presenting a Bill tomorrow-the tax and financial transparency Bill-that I hope the Government will take up. It looks very clearly at how they could take forward the measures that I have been talking about, and I hope that he will come and listen to me present the Bill tomorrow. It contains just the sort of thing that the Government are looking to find out about. It would release billions of pounds to the Exchequer from people who should be the most liable for the problems that they cause.
	To conclude, I very much hope for a proper debate not only on the Budget, but on the way in which we have got ourselves into an unholy mess, because of the way in which the financial sector has behaved. Let me give an example to show how serious the situation is. Today, when I visited a company that will remain nameless, it was made clear to me that it was in a parlous state, but that it had managed to see things through because of its ingenuity. That made me think about how interrelationships with the financial markets impact on ordinary manufacturing companies in this country. Two things had really hit that company. First, it had invested heavily in Iceland, from which it learned the awful lesson that those who pay higher rates of interest are not necessarily able, ultimately, to defend what they are doing. The second thing was the way in which foreign banks have shut down loans virtually overnight. That is why lending through British banks-

Greg Hands: I certainly will, and I thank my hon. Friend for the intervention. I also acknowledge the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Leominster (Bill Wiggin), who made some very strong points about cider at Environment, Food and Rural Affairs questions last Thursday. The voice from across the Conservative party has been unanimous in condemning the rise in duty. We should target strong, mass-produced products that, as they have such a low apple content, are barely cider at all. That is the Conservative approach.
	The right hon. Member for Sheffield, Central (Mr. Caborn) also made his final speech. I rather enjoyed our debate on "Newsnight" last Monday about the role of the Unite trade union in taking over the Labour party. I found it interesting at the time that he failed to support the British Airways workers going to their jobs. I was in his constituency on Friday, as he knows-I will come to that in due course-and I have to say that the Federation of Small Businesses in Sheffield takes a very different view on the Budget from the one that he described today.
	My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) made a lovely speech. He reminded us that he has represented three seats. I wonder whether he had the opportunity to make three maiden speeches. It is our loss that he only has the opportunity to make one farewell speech. He appropriately spoke of the responsibility that we all have through the generations, and in this case about the Government's appalling debt crisis and the moral imperative for us to find a solution.
	The right hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (Mr. Hutton) is another Labour ex-Minister with whom I enjoyed a debate recently, at the  Financial Times election forum. Tonight he gave a thoughtful speech that confirmed the very good reputation that he has had in the House. I agree with him that we are not a post-industrial society. In fact, to return to Sheffield for a moment, I made a very important visit on Friday to ITM Power, which is making zero-carbon, hydrogen-powered cars and was very impressive. The right hon. Gentleman, as is his wont, attacked the Government, in this case for their proposal for a credit adjudicator and the new 50 per cent. tax rate, as he did last year, to be fair to him. We wish him the best and hope that he has a double reason to celebrate on 6 May. Not only is it his birthday, but I believe he will celebrate and cherish the fact that it will be the last day of the current Prime Minister being in office. He was absolutely right when he said that the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr. Brown) would be an awful Prime Minister.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry), who is also retiring, made an elegant speech, which covered many broad intergenerational themes, including our role in the world. The hon. Member for Tyne Bridge (Mr. Clelland) is standing down too, and he called the Budget "unexciting". Perhaps he meant it as a compliment, but, as a do-nothing Budget, it is not what the country needs. However, he spoke well in support of our policy on high-speed rail and made some important points about the value of clubs and charges, with reference to amusement machine licence duty.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples), who is also standing down, spoke appropriately about our responsibility to the next generation on debt. He spoke powerfully about facing up to the implications of debt unless we get a grip on our public finances, and the need to boost business and improve skills in the work force. He made important points about improving ethics in the City.
	The hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) mentioned his support for the Tobin tax, which was the Government's position until the Obama Administration told the Prime Minister that it would definitely not go ahead. Instead, the Conservative party is in line with the US Administration in calling for a banking levy on leverage. In my short five years here, I have always found the hon. Gentleman to be a first-class parliamentarian and I wish him all the very best.
	The right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr. Kennedy) made some important points on behalf of his constituents. He talked about his support for Government spending, but left me wondering what he thinks of his successor's pledge to make "savage cuts". The hon. Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts) argued for high-tech value-added business in his constituency and praised the green investment bank, which was again a policy that the Conservative party first proposed.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) made a characteristically powerful speech, describing a disastrous Government. I entirely agree. The hon. Member for Crawley (Laura Moffatt), who is also standing down, gave a characteristically loyalist speech, but I wish her all the best in her future career. The hon. Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson) gave various warnings about what would happen if we did not get policy on the economy right.
	My hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Mr. Spring) talked about the noble reasons for his entering politics in the 1970s and his regrets that, thanks to the Government, we seem to have come full circle on many matters. I think he said that history is repeating itself. He rightly attacked the Government's tax on jobs through the big increases in national insurance and highlighted the work of Policy Exchange on the severe negative impact that the tax rise would have on growth. We will miss him greatly. He has been an invaluable help to our shadow Treasury team and I wish him all the very best for the future.
	The hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) also gave a final speech. He spoke well of the future of UK science and engineering and the importance of innovation. He said that the Budget provided little cheer. It is unfortunate for him that he will find it difficult to square his rhetoric with his leader's pledge on savage cuts.
	I am sure that the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner) will not be a final speech. He spoke well about our moral duty to decrease the debt and said that we cannot leave it to the people who got us into the crisis to get us out. The hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) claimed that he was standing on a different programme for the election from that of the Government, but I feel that his fate will nevertheless probably be the same.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne) made some important points about growth and the Government's optimism, to which I will revert in due course, and also attacked the deficit and the cynical failure to spell out the consequences of freezing personal allowances and other Labour subterfuges, including the impact on petrol retailers. My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Norfolk (Christopher Fraser) spoke strongly about the need to take measures to strengthen the family. We wish him all the best in his future career and send best wishes to his wife, too.
	I hope that this is not the last occasion on which I will address the House, although it will probably be the last time I speak as the Member for Hammersmith rather than the Member for Fulham. I am proud to have served as the first Conservative Member of Parliament for Hammersmith since 1966, and I greatly hope that Shaun Bailey will succeed me in that part of the constituency. He will be the first Conservative Member of Parliament for Shepherd's Bush since Sir William Bull in 1918, and I shall return to Sir William later.
	First, I want to consider gold. When debating the last Labour Budget, we should examine the Labour Government's overall record under the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath in the past 13 years. I was fascinated by the end-of-the-year investment review of the decade in  The Sunday Times, which was published just before Christmas. The review featured the best and worst-performing investments in the past decade-that is, since 2000. It showed that the best-performing asset class was gold, and that the worst-performing shares in the same period were Royal Bank of Scotland shares. Whatever our Prime Minister intends to do after he is given the heave-ho, let us hope that he has no intention of becoming a fund manager. The Prime Minister told last year's Labour party conference that the test of a Government is the quality of their judgment, but on gold and their economic record in general, their judgment has been calamitous.
	It is worth dwelling for a moment on the subject of gold, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex did, because the Prime Minister says that he has made the right calls throughout. We have noted that he is resisting freedom of information demands, and many of us know why. In May 1999, he first signalled to the market that he would sell 400 tonnes of gold at a 20-year low in the price. That is never a good time either to telegraph a big sale or to sell, and that became known as the Brown bottom. The Prime Minister sold off Britain's gold for between $256 and $296 an ounce, raising around $3.5 billion. Since that time, the price has almost quadrupled, despite low inflation, and the total loss to the economy is independently reckoned to be a staggering $6 billion. That was the Prime Minister's version of black Wednesday. Unlike 1992, it was not partly driven by the force of circumstance; it was a decision taken by our Prime Minister entirely of his own volition and entirely at his own choice of time.
	I mentioned that the Budget has gone down very badly in my constituency, but to get a wider cross-section of views, on Thursday and Friday, I went to Leeds, Morley and Sheffield in Yorkshire. Judging by the mood at the Leeds chamber of commerce and the Sheffield Federation of Small Businesses, the Budget went down very badly there too. The mood in Morley, where the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families will be a candidate, was particularly hostile. Our candidate Antony Calvert and I launched our document, "Getting Morley Moving", which went down very well in Morley high street and Morley market.
	Of course, the Budget is all about debt. Remarkably, Labour has embarked on a strategy designed deliberately to increase our debt. At Prime Minister's questions in December 2008, at the outset of this crisis, we were told that
	"we need debt to rise, we do not resile from that."-[ Official Report, 17 December 2008; Vol. 485, c. 1096.]
	As we know, Labour has already doubled the debt and will double it again. Remarkably, in this Budget, the Chancellor presented as a triumph the reduction in the forecast borrowing from £178 billion to £167 billion. At that point, he rather reminded me of a football manager who praises the quality of his team's consolation goal after they receive a 5-1 drubbing.
	As various of my hon. Friends have pointed out, the amount of debt this year-£167 billion-is more than the Treasury raises in income tax. Borrowing is almost £500 million a day, and in the 15 minutes of my speech, the Government will have borrowed another £4 million, which is more than most people could ever dream of earning in their lifetime. As important as the new debt is the amount that we are paying as a country in interest on existing debt, which someone mentioned. This year, at £43 billion, debt interest will overtake the defence budget, and next year it will overtake the schools budget.
	The figures on debt interest are grim, but the main risks-remarkably-are on the downside. There are two main risks. First, there is an assumption that interest rates will remain low. Most figures for debt interest in 2014 assume an average interest rate on that debt of 4.4 per cent. I hope that interest rates will remain low, and that is a big priority for an incoming Conservative Government, but clearly, the risk is that interest's rates might rise, not fall. Secondly, there is an assumption that growth will be strong. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow pointed out, despite a small downgrade in the growth forecast in 2011, the Government are still forecasting growth of between 3 and 3.5 per cent., but independent forecasts are for 2.1 per cent. The Treasury forecasts growth rates of 3.25 to 3.75 per cent. in all years thereafter, but again, the risk is that we will undershoot that-there is not much chance that we will overshoot it. Lower growth feeds through to a bigger deficit, which in turn leads to more debt interest. We have to take urgent action to prevent this perfect storm of high debt, high interest payments, downwards pressure on our currency, low growth and static or worsening employment from happening.
	On Thursday,  The Sun said that this Budget and the Chancellor could be summed up in four words, "spend now, pay later"-only he is spending now, and you will pay later. Budget day was a real throwback to the 1970s, not just with the size of the borrowing and a Government seemingly crying, "Crisis, what crisis?", but with picket lines outside the Treasury and this very Parliament. There is better news for the country-I can report a return tonight to double digit poll leads for the Conservatives, just as happened in 1979.
	I conclude by returning to the subject of my predecessor as Member of Parliament for Hammersmith, Sir William Bull. He was once suspended from the House for calling the Prime Minister a traitor. I do not intend to make the same comment today, but I will say that with the Government borrowing £500 million a day-and borrowing more this year and next than all other Governments in history combined-and given how Labour has run the whole economy into the ground, it is the whole Government who have betrayed our country.

Stephen Timms: No. Actually, we have been successful in avoiding the big increase in long-term unemployment that was such a damaging feature in the 1980s and the 1990s. The hon. Gentleman is right to draw attention to concerns about youth unemployment, which is the reason why we offered the six-month guarantee for 18 to 24-year olds, which we extended in the Budget for a further year.
	The hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne) spoke on behalf of the Liberal Democrats. Let me make a couple of points about cider duty, which is of course significantly less than duty on other alcoholic drinks. The two largest companies produce some 80 per cent. of cider in the UK; indeed, I noticed that the share price of one of them went up on Budget day. The majority of cider producers-some 400 smaller producers, producing less than 70 hectolitres-will not be affected at all. The duty rise was concentrated on the strongest industrial ciders-the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) mentioned them-which are those with the lowest apple content, such as Frosty Jack's and Diamond White, with which there has been a link with disorderly behaviour, as we all know.
	I take issue with one point that the hon. Member for Taunton made. Referring to the child trust fund, he said that having a pot of money does not have an impact on life chances. He is quite wrong about that: in fact, it is the case-there is clear evidence to show this-that having a sum of money as one enters adulthood can make a big impact for the better on life chances. The child trust fund delivers that in an important way.

Stephen Timms: To address the anomaly that was the previous differential in the duty. However, as I have said, there is a continuing advantage for cider producers in the system as amended.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Central (Mr. Caborn) rightly welcomed the Budget's impact on manufacturing. I have also visited the Advanced Manufacturing Park, to which he referred, and I have seen the work of Boeing and others that are based there. I join him in paying tribute to the work that Professor Keith Ridgway has done and welcome the announcement of the investment at Sheffield Forgemasters, with the establishment of perhaps the biggest press in the world. He is right to say that we in the UK want to be at the forefront of the global nuclear supply chain.
	The right hon. and learned Member for Devizes (Mr. Ancram) also gave a thoughtful valedictory speech, the theme of which was stewardship, and demanded that the deficit be cut more quickly than we have proposed. He was followed by two speakers with whom I have worked closely. My right hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Mr. Hutton) welcomed the measures for business in the Budget, pointing out that the Conservative arithmetic does not add up, particularly following today's announcements about national insurance reductions. He did a superb job as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and as Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.
	I first met the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) when I was a local authority leader and he was the local government Minister, and I was struck by the tributes that were paid to his work on behalf of local government by two of my hon. Friends today: my hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts) and for Tyne Bridge (Mr. Clelland). Those tributes reflect the wide respect for the right hon. Gentleman's work as the local government Minister. It was characteristic that he spoke about local government today, as well as expressing a view on policy on Europe that was somewhat dissonant from that of some of his hon. Friends.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Tyne Bridge drew attention to the dramatic regeneration that is under way in the north-east, including the announcement of the new electric car being built at Nissan and today's announcement by Siemens of a big investment in offshore wind manufacture in the UK. He was right to draw our attention to those achievements.
	The hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples) called for the deficit to be eliminated faster, but it was striking that he did not answer the question put to him in an intervention by the hon. Member for Taunton about how that would square with today's announcement from the shadow Front Bench of an almost £6 billion reduction in national insurance income to the Exchequer. That would leave a gaping hole in the Conservative party's calculations.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) supported the proposals for separating the different functions of the banks-as, to a degree, did the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon. My hon. Friend wanted to see greater ambition in the proposals for a green investment bank. I know he will welcome the imminent commencement of the feed-in tariff arrangements for renewable energy. I pay tribute to him for being one of the first in the House to have called for that change. His campaign was successful, and he was an early champion of those arrangements, which will take effect in the next couple of weeks. I echo the tributes that have been paid to him today.
	The right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr. Kennedy) made a number of points about his constituency. I particularly agree with what he said about the importance of investment in broadband. The Government's commitment is, first, to ensure that at least a basic level-2 megabits per second-of broadband service is universally available by 2012. I expect his constituency to be among the major beneficiaries of that investment, and we have identified some £200 million to support that commitment. Beyond that, we want to extend next-generation broadband services to every part of the UK. That is the reason for the 50p a month levy on phone lines, which I think he supports. He is right to do so, because that levy will generate £1 billion of investment between now and 2017, enabling us to ensure that at least 90 per cent. of UK households have access to next-generation services by that date. It struck me forcefully when I visited Scotland how strong the support for that programme was. There is widespread recognition of its importance to the rural businesses in Scotland-and, indeed, in England-that will benefit from its services, just as urban areas are already starting to do.

Anne McIntosh: I am delighted to have secured this extremely important and timely debate on the planning process and accountability. I welcome the Minister, and I look forward to what I hope will be a positive, constructive response from him.
	The purpose of the planning system should be to balance economic, social and environmental priorities at national and local level. However, the planning system currently tends to create bureaucratic barriers rather than support communities in their future development. Many local politicians, councillors and planning authority officers have tried to make the current system work, however, and I take this opportunity to place on record my praise for the role they play throughout the country in taking these very difficult decisions.
	Since coming to office in 1997, the Government have taken power over planning away from locally elected representatives to a more centralised control, and have given decisions to Whitehall and regional government. As a result, during this period there has throughout the country been a growing mistrust of the planning system. The Government have transferred strategic responsibility for housing and planning from local councils to unelected regional quangos. Their policies have increased centralisation and further reduced local people's say over planning decisions, and the abolition of the county structure plans has led to even more red tape. I would like to think that the Government have done one good thing, however, in recruiting a chief planner who has a better understanding than most hitherto of planning in rural areas, as his formative years were spent in a predominantly rural area.
	Over recent years, a pattern has evolved in planning applications; in my experience, that is certainly the case in the rural area I represent. A developer, business or promoter of an application makes a planning application to the local planning authority, and a half-hearted consultation exercise follows, prior to a final, formal planning application taking place. Arguments are rehearsed as to why that particular application for that particular project fills a particular need for that type of project, which is missing in that local community. The planning authority may well then turn down that planning application for good reason, such as that it is contrary to the local development plan. It is a fact that the planning system in England is currently a plan-led system, involving following a plan that sets out what can be built and where the development should take place.
	There are currently two main levels of plan. There is the regional spatial strategy. Each regional planning body such as the North-East of England-or Yorkshire and the Humber, with which the Minister and I are more familiar-prepares a regional spatial strategy setting out objectives such as how many homes are required to meet the future needs of people in the region or, perhaps, whether the region needs a major new shopping centre or airport. Also, each local planning authority should prepare a local development framework. There is a folder of documents that sets out how each local area may change over the next few years. There may be other types of plan too, such as on how to deal with waste, which are usually prepared by county councils. There is a bewildering array of plans, and each different type of plan is usually available in the local library.
	The Government have passed further powers. They have passed powers over housing and planning to the unelected regional development agencies and the rebranded regional assemblies. Most recently, they have created a central planning quango, the Infrastructure Planning Commission, which will strip the local authorities and Secretary of State of their say on major planning applications. The IPC will quickly be bogged down in legal challenges, coming from judicial review in the High Court to the European Court of Justice, which will be costly and time-consuming. The regional spatial strategy process is in disarray. The regional spatial strategies of the east of England and the south-east have been subject to High Court review, and Ministers have delayed the publication of the final south-west strategy to pre-empt similar legal challenges.
	This is nothing short of a fiasco, which has left the planning system in limbo. A huge number of councils and developers are unable to make progress on planning applications. Indeed, a survey of planners' views on Labour's planning regime-the local development framework process-found that 97 per cent. believed that it had not led to a quicker process. That survey was cited in  Planning on 5 October 2009 and was undertaken by Cushman and Wakefield and the Town and Country Planning Association.
	I believe that local communities should be given the greatest possible opportunity to have their say and for there to be the greatest possible degree of local control. As for the role of councillors, the Local Government Association has issued guidance, which takes account of the Local Government Act 2000 and the 2001 national model code of conduct for councillors. The most recent-2007-revision to the code does not affect these issues, but it covers lobbying, among other things. It says:
	"It is important to recognise that lobbying is a normal and perfectly proper part of the political process. Those who may be affected by a planning decision will often seek to influence it through an approach to their elected ward member or to a member of the planning committee."
	It continues:
	"However, lobbying can lead to the impartiality and integrity of a councillor being called into question, unless care and common sense is exercised by all the parties involved. When being lobbied, councillors (members of the planning committee in particular) should take care about expressing an opinion that may be taken as indicating that they have already made up their mind".
	These well-meaning codes of conduct remove the right of local councillors to form a view, to express a view or to listen formally to and consult those who are most affected by an individual project and planning application. As a result, the way in which the system works means that the electorate and those who live closest to the site involved in the planning application feel that their opinions on these applications and on the planning developments proposed are being totally ignored and that developments are being imposed on them without their views being heard. That sense of disfranchisement and of democratic deficit can lead to disenchantment and feelings of antagonism. Only radical change can possibly deliver the planning system that we need to secure in the years to come.
	Rather than having one planning structure determined centrally and then applied without variation across the country, would it not be better to have a planning system with a basic national framework of planning priorities and policies but where the local plan is truly local? Should it not be a local plan for local people? That is precisely what the Conservatives are proposing. We would like there to be proper democratic checks and balances that are seen and have to be respected in the decision making on any planning application, not a plan that can be so easily overruled by a higher tier. Therefore, we would not work with the IPC. We would abolish it, while retaining its expertise. We would abolish and replace the entire bureaucratic and undemocratic tier of regional planning, including the regional spatial strategies, the regional planning bodies and the national and regional building targets. We believe that those targets should be set locally, as it is the local people who have to live with the consequences of any planning decision. We would re-enable proper planning inquiries and-yes-give back discretion to the Secretary of State.
	Surely the Minister agrees that we should create a planning system where for local people the decision-making ability is seen to be transparent and accountable to local councils and that local government should be able to produce its own distinctive local policies to create communities that are enjoyable to live in, sustainable and attractive.
	In my area, there are currently a number of very contentious applications at both district level, notably a residential community for the elderly, and county council level, where there are several proposals for energy-from-waste facilities and, most recently, one for a wind farm. In each case, the code of conduct applies to those most affected-those who live closest to each individual planning application. I am sure, Mr. Speaker, that Buckingham is no different to the Vale of York in this regard, and we can each point to a village or to several villages-if not every village-in our areas that have a proposal. It could be an affordable housing proposal, for example. Hon. Members on both sides of the House would like to see more affordable housing, and the decision should be about where it is most appropriate to put the housing and the number of houses that there should be. You will be familiar, Mr. Speaker, with the scenario in which residents write, "We have nothing against affordable housing; in fact, we welcome it, but we do not think it should be next door to us. We know just the site for it at the other side of the village."
	So, the arguments are well rehearsed and I am sure that the Minister's constituency will contain many such examples, too. I am delighted that the Minister is here, as an outstanding alumnus of Lady Lumley's school in Pickering, and he is deeply familiar with those aspects across rural North Yorkshire. I am sure that he will echo my experience with the residents in these circumstances, whatever the nature of the planning application. I try so hard to explain the processes involved in making planning decisions rather than to engage in a discussion of the merits of the application when the decisions are rightly taken elsewhere. However, the residents feel aggrieved and that their concerns are not being heard, and they approach their MP to intervene. That reflects the confusion over the role of both local and national Government in the decision-making process on planning applications, as well as over the roles of the Planning Inspectorate, of the planning authorities and of an MP.
	Common practice is, as the Prime Minister said as recently as 17 March, that
	"a planning decision is not a matter for this House but one for the planning authorities."-[ Official Report, 17 March 2010; Vol. 507, c. 877.]
	In my view, MPs are best not taking a political decision on the merits of planning applications but can guide constituents and those who feel aggrieved by the planning process on where the decisions are taken and which authority is responsible. When Parliament has devolved power to a local authority, I believe that we should respect that decision of Parliament. Parliament has entrusted the local planning authority in each case to take responsibility for day-to-day planning decisions in its area. It is right that in general the authorities should be free to carry out their duties responsibly with the minimum of interference.
	May I take the opportunity to ask the Minister to give an unequivocal statement this evening on what the role of an MP should be as regards planning issues, at what stage an MP should rightly intervene, on what the role of the Planning Inspectorate is and on what his interpretation is of the code of conduct advising councillors on what their role should be? Does he agree that there is a democratic deficit, and does he believe that the planning process should be revisited?
	A Library note that was prepared for me, on 23 March, for this debate tells me:
	"A Planning Minister should not discuss a planning case with any interested party to a decision. This advice applies, in particular, to decisions on recovered planning appeals and called-in planning applications...Ministers should decline requests for meetings from MPs, delegations of local people, parties to an appeal or a called-in application, pressure groups or any other party who wish to make representations about a particular planning matter. The same principle applies to other forms of contact with interested parties, including telephone calls."
	As I felt that was not sufficiently clear, I was given further clarification from an earlier note, dated 29 January 2009, that
	"It is often the case that representations from MPs, pressure groups or other interested parties will be made to persuade Ministers either for or against the call-in of a planning application, rather than leaving the decision to the local authority."
	Finally, I was advised:
	"Whilst such representations may be taken into account in the decision on whether or not to call in the application,"
	the law states that
	"ministers should act, and be seen to act, fairly and should not discuss the decisions with these parties."
	With all such planning applications, there is a feeling of grievance and that people's views are not being heard. People feel that, in most cases, a planning authority is perfectly capable of coming to a sound planning decision, but that such decisions are then overruled, called in or looked at on appeal. A planning inquiry then follows and a planning inspector overrules the views of the democratically elected councillors of that planning authority. That top-down approach to planning has led to a real sense of disfranchisement and disenchantment and a feeling of democratic deficit. There is a feeling that the views of the electorate and local residents on many current applications in the Vale of York are being ignored. We must restore democracy and accountability to the planning system, and we must rebalance power back in favour of our local communities.
	Every cloud has a silver lining. Since I called for this debate, much to the hilarity of the local papers and some of the national press, an aggrieved constituent of mine who felt that his views were not being heard chose to pour a perfectly good glass of local beer over his MP. I am delighted to tell you, Mr. Speaker, that I have since received the sum of money required to cover the cost of dry cleaning the attire that I was wearing on that occasion.
	I want to convey to the Minister as forcibly as possible the message that there should be a local plan for local people and that sustainable development should be the key, rather than inappropriate development in inappropriate places. Regard should be had to whether functional flood plains form part of the site of such a planning application, whatever the project might be. Regard should also be had to green fields, green belt areas and the nature of areas that could be irrevocably changed for generations to come. The grounds for appeal against local planning permission should be limited either to the fact that the correct procedure was not followed in assessing the application or that a decision contravenes the local plan. The key tenets in planning policy should be restoring democratic and local control over the planning system, rebalancing the system in favour of sustainable development and sustainable communities and producing a simpler, quicker, cheaper and less bureaucratic planning system. In sum, let the people speak and let their voice be heard.